Stantiago Valasquez | 2018 Speaker
Blind people do not need to see
In today’s society it is often hard to find someone who is truly inspiring, let alone someone who shows all the values instilled in the best of us. Santiago Velasquez is the founder of EyeSyght, a budding tech company with a focus on solving one of the biggest accessibility issues in the modern world. Additionally he is a two times participant for the Kokoda challenge, has completed the Oxfam trail-walker, Ride for Life challenge, participated on the Opti Minds challenge, and has also taken part on the Griffith and Google robotics challenge in the past.
He is the first visually impaired person to attempt a electrical engineering degree in Australia and has repeatedly been invited to participate in the MIT innovation and entrepreneurship boot-camp multiple times. In addition to all of the aforementioned experiences, he was invited to be a Mentor and a judge at the first Hackathon that was run by the Perkins School for the blind in Boston. Santiago was born in April 1996 in Armenia, Colombia. He moved with his family to Australia in 2009 where he completed his schooling