Senior Spotlight: Wanghley Soares Martins, A Problem Solver Shaped by Gambiarra

Long before he was building engineering solutions for Parkinson’s disease detection or sleep apnea, Wanghley (Wan) Soares Martins was learning to solve problems on a pig farm in Brazil.

By tinkering with irrigation and smart garden solutions, Martins developed the ability to solve problems creatively with the resources at hand. He learned early on that a lack of specialized tools was not a barrier but an invitation to innovate. This ethos, known in Brazil as “gambiarra,” has served him well as an engineer focused on tackling real-world medical problems.

Gambiarra shaped his pathway and followed him to Duke University, where he will graduate this spring with a double major in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and computer science along with a certificate in innovation and entrepreneurship.

“I came to Duke with a gambiarra mindset,” Martins said. “It was already my way to solve problems using the resources I had. Duke was the next stage for innovating.”

Martins arrived at Duke as a Karsh International Scholar, bringing with him the ingenuity he’d developed in Brazil. One of his most memorable experiences came during his first year, when he introduced his classmates to the idea of gambiarra on the TEDxDuke stage – the first time he’d spoken in English before hundreds of people. That moment transformed his resourcefulness from a personal habit into a professional philosophy. It proved that “gambiarra” could be a universal language for global engineering.

Initially he planned to study biomedical engineering (BME) but soon realized that ECE would give him a broader technical base for the kinds of health care technology he wanted to build. Through coursework, teaching and research, he developed expertise across the three fields at the center of his work.

“I like to describe it as a tripod,” Martins said. “I’m right in the middle between electrical engineering, computer science and the medical field.”

To deepen his engineering knowledge, he became a teaching assistant and eventually worked across much of the ECE 200-level curriculum, with a particular focus on ECE 280: Signals and Systems. Teaching gave him a way to test his knowledge across multiple areas of ECE and make connections between topics. He is now helping redesign the class’s laboratory with a broader, more application-driven approach. By focusing on real-world signals and physical hardware, he ensures students master the core fundamentals that generative algorithms cannot replicate.

“Duke taught me how to be an expert and understand a lot about something, but not forget about the broader view, which is also important when you’re thinking about problem solving,” Martins said.

He also dove into biomedical engineering research as a way to apply the knowledge from his ECE studies. Martins became a research assistant and collaborated in the labs of Jessilyn Dunn, associate professor of BME, Leslie Collins, professor of ECE, and Shruti Agashe, assistant professor of neurology, while working on projects related to sleep monitoring, deep brain stimulation and Parkinson’s disease.

He said one of the most meaningful parts of his Duke experience was the opportunity to work at the intersection of engineering and clinical care, collaborating with medical experts while applying his ECE background to problems with direct impact on people’s lives. His academic journey culminated in a senior project focused on using machine learning to clean brain signals during deep brain stimulation. This work bridges the gap between complex data and clinical reality.

“I was always passionate about coming up with a solution, seeing people use it and be happy about it,” Martins said.

That motivation has kept him focused on Parkinson’s disease, a problem he first began working on as a high schooler in Brazil. Today, he is part of a team developing non-contact capacitive sensing technology that can detect tremors without attaching sensors to the body.

“I can clearly see the impact of my work,” Martins said. “A diagnosis that would take four or five weeks in the past, we can now give to them in under two hours.”

For Martins, that kind of impact connects directly back to his love of gambiarra. As a child, that instinct inspired him to build practical systems to save time and improve daily life for his family. Now, gambiarra drives him to build devices and systems that can improve medical diagnosis and patient care.

After graduation, Martins will take his engineering foundation to Rice University, where he will pursue a PhD in ECE focused on biosensors and edge computing for health applications. Long-term, he hopes to continue building startups while tapping into Houston’s health tech and biotech ecosystem, anchored by the Texas Medical Center.

Research and entrepreneurship are part of the same pursuit for Martins: deeper knowledge, better tools and stronger partnerships to solve problems that matter—the gambiarra way.