After leading her students through a series of kinetic warmup exercises, Tori Barrington turns off the music and announces the night’s first dance moves.

“We’re going to start with jazz walks on our toes,” she says.

Barrington demonstrates, strutting, cat-like, down the center of the mirrored room.

“And give me something with your arms,” she says, now waving her limbs in flowy, opposite motions, until she completes the movement with a snappy turn.

Barrington’s work at the ReVive Dance Co. in Morro Bay is vastly different from her studies as a biomedical engineering student. But she excels at both.

“I think Tori is setting an amazing example for this and the next generation that you don’t have to stop at one passion, one hobby or one career,” said Jackie Hunsaker, founder and co-owner of ReVive.

Barrington’s interests date back to her early childhood in Crystal Lake, Illinois, a rural city of 40,000 north of Chicago.

“When I was younger, I used to run around on my tippy toes a lot, so my mom put me in dance when I was three,” she said during a break from her Summer Undergraduate Research Project (SURP).

Her passion for science came in the fourth grade, when she read a National Geographic story about a team of biomedical engineers that cloned a dog.

“Since reading that one article, I decided that I wanted to be a biomedical engineer,” she said.

As her interest in science grew — her best friend bought her an anatomy book for her 16th birthday — Barrington continued to improve at dance, studying several styles, including ballet, jazz and contemporary.

“In high school, I was training at a pre-professional level, so anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week,” she said.

She won several dance awards and scholarships, which she used to attend Cal Poly. But while she has performed often, she never considered dance as a career path.

“For me dance is how I express and how I emote, so it’s super intimate and personal,” she said. “And it’s not something I would want to tie an income to.”

Barrington continues dance, though, with Orchesis, a performance-based dance company on campus, and teaching at ReVive.

“When we first met Tori, we immediately noticed her technique,” Hunsaker said. “It was very obvious she had been training for years, but the more we got to know her as a teacher and choreographer, we realized not only was she an incredible dancer, but the passion and intentions behind her movement make her truly one of a kind.”

As a teacher, Hunsaker said, Barrington excels at visualization, finding the energy in the room and making the dancers feel good about what they’re doing.

“Her attention to detail definitely carries over into both passions,” Hunsaker said.

Barrington also works with a nonprofit, Everybody Dance Now!, teaching low-income children. This summer, she taught Central Coast elementary school kids in Guadalupe and Solvang.

“Art is usually the first thing to get cut from budgets at schools, and it’s super important, even for STEM fields, to be able to think creatively,” she said.

Helping promote diversity is also important to Barrington, who previously served at the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion chair for the Society of Women Engineers.

“As a woman in STEM and a woman of color in STEM, it’s important for me to be able to break down barriers,” she said. “So anything I can do to create a more welcoming space for myself and my peers is something I’m really passionate about.”

All of her interests make for a hectic schedule. And yet the senior has been a regular on the Dean’s List, which recognizes undergraduate students who have completed at least 12 letter-graded units at Cal Poly during the quarter with a 3.5 grade point average or better.

“It takes time management and a lot of determination and motivation to put all of those things together,” said Trevor Cardinal, a BMED professor who mentored her during the SURP research. “A lot of students could do each of those things, but to package all of that into her day and week is really impressive.”

Barrington’s dancing, Cardinal said, supports her research, which entails seeking a cell therapy for vascular disease.

“Research is hard, and 90 percent of research is failure,” he said. “So if you can have something like dance or teaching that lets your mind go to a different place and focus on something else and get some rewards from that while the research is being challenging, it helps keep the motivation up.”

Dance helps further her technical and emotional growth, Barrington said — and provides a therapeutic release. When she gets stuck academically, Barrington will don headphones in her dorm room and cut loose.

If she’s sad, she might do a soft, contemporary dance to Adele. If she’s confident, maybe a hip hop dance to rapper D Smoke. And when she’s frustrated, the graceful ballerina might opt for something a little more aggressive.

“I definitely have moments when I headbang to heavy metal,” she said. “I’m a big fan of Megadeath.”