I’m a Mechanical Engineer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up in Massachusetts but moved to California in 2016 before going to grad school for robotics and controls at UC San Diego.

At UCSD I studied the physics of flapping flight in hovering insects using a dynamically-scaled robot. We used it to validate a model of the insect anatomy that helped show how the “stretchiness” of insect muscle, plus some really interesting muscle adaptations, enable efficient flapping at hundreds of wingbeats per minute. My work is now being used both to study new designs for efficient flying robots and to help understand the subtleties of evolutionary adaptation across species of flying insect.

Since graduating in May 2023, I’ve worked at Exponent, Inc. as a Mechanical Engineering consultant. I assist a wide variety of clients across the medical device, consumer electronics, robotics, automotive sectors, among others, by performing root cause and failure modes and effects analysis, designing custom precision experimental setups according to industry standards, and supporting expert witness depositions in litigation cases. I work alongside dozens of other Ph.D.’s from many different disciplines to solve multidisciplinary problems that require broad expertise and strong communication skills, both internal and external, and both highly technical and for more general audiences.

A few more quick things about me:

• I’m a gardener interested in growing things to cook and eat, but also excited to introduce more California native plants to the neighborhood.
• I get super excited when I see a hoverfly or a tiny metallic green sweat bee or a dragonfly in the garden.
• I love to cook, and I’m trying to build my confidence around baking.
• I was a voracious reader as a kid, but grad school made it tough to read fiction; I’m now trying to catch up on the sci-fi and other speculative fiction I missed while digging through endless insect neuromuscular dynamics and nonlinear oscillator papers.
• I’m also getting back into guitar; I played weekly with friends all through college, but fell off when it was just me playing alone.