Welcome to my website. I've always had a passion to create, learn, and understand the world around me. Modern technologies such as robotics, autonomous cars, and wearable electronics ignite the imagination as much as they inspire curiosity into how they work, prompting me to continue through a winding research career. This simple website serves as a portal into my career, distilled into a quick read. The journey is always more interesting than the destination; so for the remainder of your time on this page, I encourage you to scroll around, click some of the links, and see where your mind takes you. Otherwise, if you're in a hurry and don't know why, the tabs at the top can help you find what you're looking for. If you'd like to chat, drop me a message on LinkedIn, mentioning this website.
I started with a combined degree with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and M.S. in agricultural engineering with the ABE Automation and Robotics Lab at Iowa State University, developing robots to improve data throughput in agronomy, to help farmers improve yield and decrease environmental impact. I then completed a PhD with the Faboratory at Yale University, and served as a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow, tackling challenges in soft robotics, where I used flexible materials to enable new functionalities in robots for both Earth and space. The overarching theme of my dissertation was embedding functionality into "robotic skins" that can allow engineers to make use of the relatively unused surfaces of robots, while also serving as a multi-functional robotic prototyping platform for resource-constrained applications (think: spacecraft, dense urban areas, remote research facilities).
Since joining Arieca in April 2022, I have been contributing to the commercialization of liquid metal embedded elastomers (LMEEs) to solve problems in thermal management, primarily for the automotive and semiconductor industries. My current role is the Director of Hardware R&D, where we test our thermal interface materials in situations that mimic our end-users' setups, such as smartphones, laptops, PC's, etc.. I am co-PI on collaborations with Carmel Majidi's Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where we explore emerging applications of LMEEs, ranging from bodyheat-powered electronics to high-performing interface materials for aerospace applications. Additionally, I stay active in the soft robotics and stretchable electronics communities through joint publications (see Google Scholar) and organizations such as the Nano-Bio Materials Consortium.
Each new chapter in life brings exciting changes, new opportunities, and surprising discoveries. We can only live in the most recent one, building upon the experiences, memories, and skills gained in each prior chapter. This reverse-chronological ordering reflects this reality in a clean ordering; in reality, the journey was anything but linear.
After my PhD, I wanted to gain first-hand experience in startups, to see how companies are born. Like a star, they are at first just a nebulus idea, then they condense into a shining star to shed light on how new technology can solve contemporary problems. So, I joined Arieca around its series A close, as the company was getting ready to scale up some key customer engagements and government contracts. Arieca was co-founded by Navid Kazem and his PhD advisor, Carnegie Mellon University professor Carmel Majidi. They were investigating adding liquid metals to polymers to make multifunctional composites, including stretchable circuits and thermally conductive rubber (coining the terms "thubber" and liquid metal embedded elastomers, or LMEE). In 2018, they incorporated Arieca to commercialize LMEE, pursuing government research grants and B2B sales to partners primarily in the semiconductor and automotive industries.
Currently, I serve as the Director of Hardware R&D, where I lead an engineering team that studies how our thermal interface materials perform in end-use hardware setups, to aid our customers in their material qualification and pathfinding processes. Key engagements include joint research with ROHM Semiconductor and scaling up production with Nissan Chemical.
Additionally, our team conducts research into how our materials could solve fundamental problems in adjacent industries and emerging applications, through government contracts as well as commercial partnerships. This includes collaboration at CMU, where we make bodyheat powered wearable electronics (funded by the Nano-Bio Materials Consortium, where I was recently appointed to the Technical Advisory Council). Our recent Advanced Functional Materials paper showed technical feasibility of powering a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor for continuous monitoring of heartrate and blood oxygen without a battery.
In Fall 2016, I joined the Faboratory at Purdue University with Prof. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, to work on soft robotics. We applied compliant materials to robots, toward the goals of increased safety and dexterity. I then moved with the lab to Yale University, where I embedded robotic functionalities into thin skins, and designed shape changing robots. In Spring 2021, I received the Henry Prentiss Becton Prize for my research, and defended my dissertation in December 2021. I then stayed on as a post-doctoral researcher until I moved to Arieca in April 2022, formally receiving my PhD diploma in May 2022. All major projects led to peer-reviewed publications (see below), with my favorites described in detail below, along with selected publications:
During my concurrent degrees at Iowa State University (B.S. Mechanical Engineering and M.S. Agricultural Engineering, with thesis), I worked with Lie Tang on developing robotic systems and image-processing pipelines for data collection during the entire plant life-cycle. This data is useful for improving crop yield and studying the effects of various environmental parameters on plant health.
At first, I assisted with data collection and mechanical design (including the stand analyzer for Dr. Tang's startup, FieldRobo LLC), culminating in my masters' project where I led a small team (a few undergraduates and masters' students) to design and program robots to fulfill the goals of the broader projects. The most sophisticated one (prototype shown below in Figure 3), for the Enviratron project, was a mobile rover with a robot arm and a Kinect V2 3D camera for collision-free probing during use with researchers' specified instruments, such as a fluorometer. We additionally created a slender and compact field robot for 15% of the cost of the commercial alternative, allowing us to collect data on crops, such as corn and soybeans, that are grown in fields with narrow row spacing that conventional field robots could not navigate.
Occasionally I speak at conferences, workshops, university courses, etc. about research, startups, and life after graduate school. Periodically, these get recorded. I find it fun to look back on what I was thinking at a particular moment in time, and hope you can learn a thing or two from the ones added here (more coming soon).
Assembling an ideal team is essential to success. I'd like to acknowledge the undergraduate students who helped with my graduate school research, as this work would not be possible without their diligence and creativity.
For the curious readers like yourself who make it this far, here are some resources you may find interesting.