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About me
I am a systems engineer working at Blue Origin on Blue Moon MK2 in support of NASA's Artemis Program. In May 2024 I graduated with a PhD from the Robust Robotics Group at MIT, advised by Nick Roy and supported by a NSF Graduate Fellowship. I hold a doctoral minor in Space Systems Engineering, and a master's degree from Bill Freeman's computer vision group.
I enjoy developing both crewed and autonomous systems for exploring space, research along the lines of human-inspired but task-oriented computer vision, and advocating for scientific and ethical federal technology policy. My current role centres around systems engineering, process definition, stakeholder interactions, impact analysis, and risk management.
In the past I made electronics for Venus probes and the SPT-3G telescope, and designed sensors that helped keep rocket engines from exploding. Before attending MIT, I studied physics and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley.
Teaching
I enjoy teaching mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering in classrooms and 1-on-1, and nurturing the next generation of engineering researchers through internship.
Electromagnetics (6.630), MITGrader. Professors: Qing Hu, Jelena Notaros
Fa 2020, Fa 2022, Fa 2023
Electromagnetic Waves and Applications (6.013), MIT
Teaching Assistant. Professors: Luca Daniel, Kevin O'Brien
Sp 2022
Quantum Measurement and Control (6.644), MIT
Grader. Professor: Kevin O'Brien
Fa 2021
Signals, Systems, and Inference (6.011), MIT
Grader. Professors: George Verghese, Peter Hagelstein
Sp 2021
L.R. Ingersoll Physics Museum, UW Madison
Museum Docent. Supervisor: Steve Narf
Su 2014 - Sp 2015
Intro to Electrical Engineering (ECE 210), UW Madison
Lab Assistant. Professor: Giri Venkataramanan
Fa 2013 - Sp 2015
Interns
Xinyun (Sunshine) Jiang (Fa 2023-Sp 2024) with Sid Ancha — Anomaly detection using diffusion models. Work published at ICRA 2025.
Louisa Wood (Su 2022-Sp 2023) with Sandra Liu — Better GelSight sensors using artificial neural networks.
Stephanie Fu (Fa 2021-Sp 2023) with Mark Hamilton — Feature upsampling. Work published at ICLR 2024.
Howard Beck (Su 2022) — Priming neural depth estimators with rough disparity predictions.
Project Highlights
Lunar Ascent CameraMission Systems and Integration Intern, Lunar Transportation (Blue Origin, Su 2023)
Mentors: Dr. Alex Miller and Tim Lloyd
Rocket Engine Health Monitoring System
DreamChaser Propulsion Intern (Sierra Space, Su 2017)
Mentors: Scott Munson and J. Arthur 'Chip' Sauer
CubeSat Deployment System
InterEgr 160: Engineering Design (UW Madison, Sp 2013)
Mentors: Scott Munson and J. Arthur 'Chip' Sauer of Orbital Technologies (now part of Sierra Space)
Datasets
SurfaceGrid: (Almost) a million images for learning shape from surface contours: [LINK]from Toward Automatic Interpretation of 3D Plots (2021)
Publications
| 2025 | |
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Anomalies by Synthesis: Anomaly Detection using Generative Diffusion Models for Off-Road Navigation
with Sunshine Jiang and Sid Ancha (primaries), Travis Manderson, Yilun Du, Philip R. Osteen, and Nick Roy. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025 [Oral] Website. Preprint. Code. Colab. 3-min Video |
| 2024 | |
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PhD Thesis: Human-Inspired Methods for Extending Advances in Computer Vision to Data- and Compute-Constrained Environments
Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
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FeatUp: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Features at Any Resolution
with Stephanie Fu and Mark Hamilton (primaries), Axel Feldmann, Zhoutong Zhang, and Bill Freeman. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024 [Poster] Website. Preprint. Code. Demo. Colab. News feature |
| 2023 |
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Fusion for Reducing Domain Specificity in Computer Vision Models
with Nick Roy. March Meeting of the American Physical Society, 2023 [Oral] Abstract |
| 2022 | |
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One Visualization is Worth 1000 Words: Toward Automated Data Recovery and Interpretation from Past 3D Visualizations
with Bill Freeman. March Meeting of the American Physical Society, 2022 [Oral] Abstract. Dataset |
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The Importance of Experimental Controls: Evidence that Task-Dependent Invariances Define Functional Specialization in Cortical Hierarchy
March Meeting of the American Physical Society, 2022 [Poster] Abstract |
| 2021 | |
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SM Thesis: Shape from Surface Contours via Artificial Neural Nets
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thesis. Dataset |
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Toward Automatic Interpretation of 3D Plots
with Bill Freeman. International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2021 [Poster] Preprint. Paper. Dataset |
| 2019 |
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Graphene as a Diffusion Barrier in High-Temperature Electronics
with Ananth Yalamarthy, Peter Satterthwaite, Sam Vaziri, Savannah Benbrook, Eric Pop, and Debbie Senesky. March Meeting of the American Physical Society, 2019 [Oral] Abstract |
| 2018 |
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Variability Study for Low-Voltage Micro-Electro-Mechanical Relay Operation
with Benjamin Osoba (primary), Bivas Saha, Sergio Almeida, Jatin Patil, Maurice Roots, Edgar Acosta, Junqiao Wu, and Tsu-Jae King Liu. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices Paper |