Science isn’t always about discovering something unknown. Sometimes, it’s about creating something new.

Dr. Daniele Foresti has always been driven by a brand of curiosity focused more on what’s possible than what’s true. Growing up in Italy, he loved playing with legos and watching his dad tinker with what they could find in the local shops. His dad worked in a pasta factory. His mom was raised in a family of farmers. College was never the priority. Instead, he was told to find the thing that made him happy, and always consider how it impacted others.

As he got older, he realized that tinkering was the thing that made him happy. He loved making stuff, and discovered engineering as a way to make stuff for a living. Through his studies, he began blending the inquiry of science with the imagination of engineering. He realized that there were many scientific problems that would benefit from an engineer’s perspective. After graduation, he turned to Mechanical Engineering, a field focused on taking biological materials and figuring out how to get them to do whatever it is you want them to do.

In a sense, science became his sandbox and engineering was his sculpting tool. He played with this and that, tried something, failed, tried something else, until discovering that perfect combination of forces and properties that enabled him to do something that had never been done before.

His tinkering paid off: he figured out how to use sound waves to levitate and move liquid through mid-air.

In the past few years, Daniele joined forces with an expert in 3-D printing. He saw the limitations of it, and believed that he had a way to print just about anything onto just about anything: using the same sound waves he’d been playing with for years before.

Now his invention has the potential to transform countless industries from medicine to food to art to cosmetics. Not because Daniele had some driving question he wanted to answer, but because he wanted to see what he could do.