A 17-year-old junior at Lubbock High School has won one of the nation’s most prestigious high school science competitions with a device she designed and built to help deaf and hard-of-hearing students participate more fully in science laboratory settings — an invention that earned her a $50,000 scholarship and recognition that has put this West Texas teenager on a national stage.
Camila Torres, a junior at Lubbock High, won the Regeneron Science Talent Search top prize in the engineering category for her development of LabSense, a low-cost wearable system that translates laboratory audio cues — safety alarms, timer signals, instructional prompts — into tactile vibrations and visual alerts that deaf students can perceive without sound. The device attaches to a standard laboratory coat and pairs with a simple smartphone app.
“I have a cousin who is deaf, and she told me about how hard science labs were for her because so much of the safety information comes through sounds,” Torres said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C., where the competition was held. “I thought, there has to be a way to fix this with the technology we already have. And it turned out there was.”
Torres spent 18 months designing, building, and testing the device, working after school in her school’s newly upgraded engineering lab with guidance from science teacher Roberto Avila. She conducted user testing with deaf students at the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin and incorporated their feedback through multiple design iterations before arriving at the version she presented at the national competition.
“Camila is one of those students who comes along once in a career,” said Avila, who has taught engineering and physics at Lubbock High for 14 years. “She identified a real problem that real people have, she designed a real solution, and she tested it with actual users. That is professional-level engineering work, and she’s 17.”
The Regeneron Science Talent Search, administered by the Society for Science, is considered the nation’s most prestigious pre-college science competition, having launched the careers of dozens of Nobel laureates and leading scientists. Torres was one of 40 finalists selected from more than 1,900 entries nationwide.
The $50,000 scholarship will fund Torres’s undergraduate education, which she plans to pursue in biomedical engineering. She said she hoped to continue developing LabSense with the goal of making it commercially available at a price point accessible to public schools.
Lubbock Independent School District Superintendent Stephanie Garcia said Torres’s achievement was a source of tremendous pride for the entire school community. “Camila represents everything we hope for in our students — curiosity, perseverance, and a desire to use what she learns to help others,” Garcia said. “We are extraordinarily proud of her.”
Community celebrations were being planned in Lubbock for next weekend, with the city council expected to issue a formal recognition and local businesses organizing a fundraiser to help Torres attend additional conferences and competitions where she can present her research. Torres said she was grateful for the support but most excited about continuing to refine the device.
“The prize is amazing, but what really matters is getting this into schools,” she said. “There are deaf students in science labs all over the country who could use something like this. That’s what I’m working toward.”
