United States
Autonomous systems expert. Spends time off tidepooling and rock climbing.
Building a planetary nervous system. Scaling global balloon launch operations from 400 launches a month to 10,000. Building and leading a worldwide team of launch operators across dozens of sites on seven continents. If you want to work with logistics, operations, and bleeding-edge hardware in places most people only see on a map, I'm hiring.
Established a continuous improvement program tracking everything from weather delays to hardware failures to hydrogen logistics.
Counting carbon in the seas! Designed, tested, integrated, and operated a fleet of 50 orange autonomous sailboats. Coordinated testing and assembly for new products: 30 and 70 ft US Navy class drones. Managed test schedules. Aligned priorities between pilots, mechanical engineers, and programmers. Verified safety-critical functionality with external regulators. Wrote automated Bash electrical tests and debugged the internal Python test-automation framework. Designed mechanical tests for actuators and functional tests for cameras. Sustained the fleet with general engineering on-call support. Troubleshot engines, CAN and Ethernet issues, steering systems, PCBAs, and C++ software bugs. Managed multi-day incidents: coordinated with pilots, engineers, and customers to save multi-million dollar assets. Saved drones from storms, faltering batteries, and pirates. Contributed to the continuous improvement process (Kaizen) to increase reliability and manufacturability by tracking failures and reviewing schematics in Teamcenter. Led small teams in the field to deploy, diagnose, and repair drones on six continents.
—Mapping Mission Led engineering for a 12-drone two-year ocean mapping mission. Turned around a behind schedule, failing program: now sailed 100,000 miles and counting. Ran a months-long testing campaign to trace down half a dozen issues: both internal and from vendors. Supported the fleet for a year at sea. Tracked the reliability, wrote Engineering Change Orders, and supported both software and hardware development. —Hawaii Ocean Chemistry Mission Spearheaded mission delivery for study of ocean acidification, olivine carbon sequestration, and assessing the impact of the Maui fires on marine ecosystems. Flagship science required experimental—unreliable—sensors. Kept sensitive payloads alive for thousands of transects on six drones for a year. Spent two months in the field, often solo.
Audited classes on Marine Science Worked hospitality roles across campus
Led 80 undergraduates to create a 14 ft, 162 lb solid rocket. Worked to implement professional engineering practices and triple the size of the team. Designed system architecture and wrote requirements. Managed schedule and risks; reduced development time for this size of vehicle from two to one semesters.
Created a supersonic disk-gap-band parachute for space recovery. Read and created a library of over 100 references. Modeled deployment conditions in Matlab. Calculated deployment forces and fabric stresses. Selected and tested materials. Developed reliability analysis. Sewed parachute. Tested separation, deployment, and inflation. Launched and recovered Space-Shot Pathfinder from 30,000 ft. in July 2018. Team placed 2nd out of a pool of over 50 at IREC competition in July 2017.
Designed, manufactured, and tested the composite wing of the world's second electroaerodynamic aircraft. Doubled endurance over previous generation by blending the ion thruster with leading edge.