About

Engineer, artist, tinged with humanity

There's a kid in Orange County who builds robots out of LEGO and plays Beethoven on the piano until his hands know where to go before he does. He teaches himself C++ in middle school because the robot needs a PID loop. He plays competitive soccer at Premier level. He paints impressionistic oils under John Eagle. National Geographic publishes his photograph. He's fourteen and already teaching piano to younger kids, and playing Brahms at nursing homes because retirement centers have nice, unplayed pianos.

At fifteen, he co-leads the design of a competition robot for FIRST—the 2013 season, frisbee manipulation. His design uses two offset rollers. It works well. But he watches another team's design: one roller and a polycarbonate wedge. Faster. Simpler. Almost magical. And he understands something that will take him fifteen more years to fully articulate:

Immature design is too controlling—and it compromises the parts that really do have to be controlled.

His team wins the World Championship. Then IRI. Then they win the Industrial Design Award and Innovation in Control. He's fifteen. Applied Medical sees what happened and interviews him directly. He gets the internship. The money he earns pays for his bus, his bike, his food, his computer, and his hobbies for the rest of high school.

He stays at Applied Medical for five years. Intern at sixteen, technician, then design engineer. Pneumatic robotic tools and manipulators for medical device manufacturing, from concept to production. He learns that complexity compresses into reliability—or people get hurt.

During those years he's also playing piano. Gold Cup at OMTA. Superior awards. ICM Contemporary. Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Chopin. Thousands of improv sessions. He writes about "the path to musical climax" and "structures of harmony, counterpoint, dissonance." He teaches. He performs. He learns that expression lives within formal structure, not despite it.

He decides he needs to understand why his design intuitions work. Not math from specifications—math that works into those assumptions. He enrolls at UCSD. Cognitive Science: Machine Learning and Neural Computation.

I decided that my interest in analytically modeling, understanding, and justifying intuition was going to distract me so much from anything else I tried to do, that I might as well spend the next few years explicitly devoted to it.

Research

At RAM Labs, he gets a seat at the table with PhDs. Freedom to research across domains. He designs novel architectures—CC-GAT, HopCPT, modern Hopfield networks for conformal prediction. Leads a $250k SBIR as Principal Investigator. Authors fifteen proposals. Earns a patent. Builds pySABRE for blockchain consensus simulation. Represents the company at Google for DARPA FACT.

The through-line was never the job titles. It was always the same motion: 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. Linkage actuation. Medical device fixtures. T-UEBA pipeline. Every time, the same instinct.

Not math that works from specifications, but math that works into those assumptions.

Convictions

A well-designed tool disappears into use, amplifying human capability without demanding attention. Agent harnesses should be thin interfaces to scalable computation, not the place you stash the intelligence. If model capability doubles next year, does your system get dramatically simpler without major refactors? That's the test.

Separate what changes from what must be stable. Simplicity over speed. Correctness over features. Research that ships. Engineering that makes money.

The future belongs to those who can run along the edge of LLM psychosis without losing control.

Early Life

FIRST Robotics (2007–2013)
FRC 3476 "Code Orange"—World Champion Newton Division, Champion IRI, Design Co-Lead. Six years from middle school through high school. FLL mentor, summer camp designer, NASA camp instructor.
Competitive Piano
Gold Cup OMTA Romantic Festival (2011). 2x OMTA Superior Award. ICM Div.III South Contemporary (2014). Beethoven, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Brahms. Independent piano teacher, 2012–2014.
Applied Medical (2013–2018)
Internship at 15, design engineer by 20. Pneumatic robotic tools and manipulators for surgical device manufacturing. Concept to production.
UCSD Cognitive Science (2018–2021)
Machine Learning & Neural Computation. RL with Mattar. Neural Data Science with Voytek. The Design Lab with Hyundai and Ford.
RAM Labs (2022–2024)
ML research: GNNs, conformal prediction, Hopfield networks, SBIR PI, patent holder. Defense applications: T-UEBA, vulnerability detection, blockchain simulation.

Elsewhere

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.