About

I’m a mechatronics and robotics engineer. I’m passionate about working on complex electro-mechanical systems, at times diving deep in specific functional areas, and at other times working at the intersections between them. One day I’ll be immersed in CAD trying to get a specific mechanism out of my head and into the design space, the next day I’m wiring up a motor and controller and writing software to get things moving. I like the challenge of bridging across disciplines, pulling from different knowledge bases to make something new. I am deeply curious and always willing to learn. I feel the best engineers are the ones who have a tendency to ask lots of questions and aren’t afraid to cop to ignorance.

I’ve spent the last couple years at Apple working on robot hardware to support touch hardware validation. There I’ve done everything from designing the robots themselves, writing robot software, retrofitting existing robots with new actuated systems I designed, even making simple fixtures and generally solving whatever problem comes my way. All in high-volume, complicated, messy environments.

Prior to Apple I worked at KLA on high-precision wafer stages for semiconductor metrology equipment. There I owned the mechatronics stack from top to bottom, on two generations of wafer stages. As the technical lead I performed actuator and sensor selection, controller specification, electrical design, and oversaw the key mechanical design choices to help us reach sub-micron accuracy. I supported these systems out into the field at fabs across the world, high-volume scenarios where the environments, despite being cleanrooms, were still messy and imperfect and criticality was high.

Back before all that I co-founded my own startup, WasteWizer Technologies, making IoT weigh-scales robust enough to survive harsh construction and waste environments. You wear a lot of hats in a startup, and I handled sensor selection and integration, signal processing, firmware, software, and customer-facing prototype deployments. We sold our devices to dumpster and hauling companies, and that business still lives on.

Beyond work, I’m usually in the middle of something. Currently building:

• a humanoid robot
• a robotic arm to flip my vinyl records without having to get up from the couch (you’d think they’d have solved this already!)
• whatever other side-project grabs my attention