Juan Paulo Hinestroza

Chemist Juan Paulo Hinestroza finds research inspiration in the superhero cartoons he watched growing up in Colombia. In the 1970s, Lycra hadn’t been invented, yet the creators of the Justice League were able to dream up a stretchy, form-fitting uniform that enabled the Flash to run at high speeds. Today, Hinestroza leads the Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University and dreams of bringing some superhero flair to the clothing industry. Working in his laboratory with chemists, engineers, and designers, he combines nanotechnology with fashion design to create fabrics with unique characteristics, like the ability to change color and filter toxic gases. While growing up in Bucaramanga, a mountainous town in Colombia, Hinestroza loved to read books about other countries, and he dreamed of traveling the world. “I started to notice that three letters always appeared in the writers’ names: PhD,” he recalls. During his undergraduate studies in Colombia, he did