Action | Student News
An Intellectual Adventure
Whether Creating 3-D Imaging Technology or Playing the Trumpet,
Henrique Tono Always Aims to Exceed Expectations
by Tim Lucas
Sometimes, late at night, when he’s almost
certain there’s no one else around, Henrique Tono likes
to play his trumpet in the lab.
If you stood outside the lab’s door in the basement of Old
Chem, you’d hear him— softly at first, then exuberantly—playing
the sensuous, syncopated rhythms of salsa. Mambo. Latin jazz.
Music as hot as his hometown, the colonial seaport of Cartagena
on Colombia’s sultry Caribbean coast.
But Tono isn’t just blowing off steam. He’s conducting research.
A Nicholas School doctoral candidate in sedimentary geology,
he’s attempting to use a new 3-D ultrasound seismic imaging
technology he developed to analyze the frequency response
of trumpets, so that instrument makers in the future can design
ones that stay more in tune.
“This is just a side interest of mine, you understand, it’s
not a use I had in mind when I developed the technology,”
Tono, 44, says with a good-natured laugh. “The primary application
of the imaging system is for undersea oil exploration. It
allows researchers to see into the internal structure of submerged
sediment deposits.”
But if it also helps future Tito Puentes make sweeter salsa,
mambo and merengue music, well, that’s the beauty of research,
the outgoing Colombian says with a grin. “You never know where
a line of inquiry will lead. It’s an intellectual adventure.”
The same could be said of Tono’s life.
Born in 1960 in Philadelphia—he holds dual U.S. and Colombian
citizenship—Tono spent much of his youth in Cartagena, one
of South America’s oldest and most historic cities, where
he was surrounded by reminders of the rewards of exploration
and adventure. Cartagena, after all, was founded in 1533 as
the conquistadors’ port of entry into Spain’s Andean colonies,
and as the port of exit back to Spain for the colonies’ gold
and silver. The city’s ancient walls, grand architecture and
the fort overlooking its busy harbor bear witness to the lure
of the region’s underground riches.
But it wasn’t gold, silver or emeralds that stoked Tono’s
imagination. It was oil.
Vast reserves of petroleum lay beneath the Andes, stretching
from Venezuela in the east, westward through Colombia and
south to Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. La Luna, a type of oil-source
rock found in the region, generates more oil than any other
source rock in the world.
“There was a lot of activity, a lot of exploration going
on in the Colombian oil industry. New fields were being discovered
and opened. It was exciting,” Tono recalls.
page 1 | 2
| 3 | 4 |
