I started designing physical tools at sixteen—pneumatic robotic tools and manipulators for medical device manufacturing at Applied Medical, concept to production. Five years of that. Complexity compresses into reliability, or people get hurt.
Before that, FIRST Robotics—FRC 3476 "Code Orange." World Champions, IRI Champions, I co-led design. The insight that stuck from a frisbee robot at fifteen: immature design is too controlling, and it compromises the parts that really do have to be controlled.
Through those years I played competitive piano. Gold Cup OMTA, Superior awards, ICM Contemporary. Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Chopin. Thousands of improv sessions. I taught piano and performed at nursing homes because retirement centers have nice, unplayed pianos. Expression lives within formal structure, not despite it.
I eventually accepted that modeling intuition—not merely using it—was my core problem. UCSD became the formal phase of that inquiry: Cognitive Science (Machine Learning & Neural Computation), reinforcement learning with Mattar, neural data science with Voytek, and design-research work with Hyundai and Ford through The Design Lab.
At RAM Labs I got a seat at the table with PhDs. Designed CC-GAT and HopCPT architectures, led a $250k SBIR as PI, authored fifteen proposals, earned a patent, built pySABRE for blockchain consensus simulation. Represented the company at Google for DARPA FACT. Defense applications—T-UEBA, vulnerability detection—where efficiency under constraint, interpretability, and graceful degradation aren't optional.
At Drone Institute and through consulting, I shipped production systems end-to-end under aggressive cost and time constraints: architecture, implementation, deployment, and operations. The pattern remains the same—compress complexity where possible, expose it where necessary, and preserve legibility for the humans steering the system.
The through-line across thirteen years: take a messy, high-dimensional problem space, find the structural decomposition, build the interface that lets the high-entropy parts iterate without breaking the low-entropy foundation. Frisbee intake. Pneumatic fixture. T-UEBA pipeline. Every time, the same instinct.
There are two archetypes within which I rest—the engineer, the artist, tinged with humanity: this combination is the key to understanding me and my pursuit of eudaemonia.