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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 centers 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 scientists and engineers through outreach and internships.
Interns
Cristian Guzman (Su 2025) with Ken Jacobson at Blue Origin — MK2 Audio Belt Pack design & human factors evaluation.Xinyun (Sunshine) Jiang (Fa 2023-Sp 2024) with Sid Ancha in the Robust Robotics Group — Anomaly detection using diffusion models. Work published at ICRA 2025.
Howard Beck (Su 2022) in the Robust Robotics Group — Priming neural depth estimators with rough disparity predictions.
Louisa Wood (Su 2022-Sp 2023) with Sandra Liu in the Perceptual Science Group — Better GelSight sensors using artificial neural networks.
Stephanie Fu (Fa 2021-Sp 2023) with Mark Hamilton in Bill Freeman's computer vision group — Feature upsampling. Work published at ICLR 2024.
Classes
MIT 6.630 Electromagnetics (Fa 2020, Fa 2022, Fa 2023) — Professors Qing Hu & Jelena Notaros.MIT 6.013 Electromagnetic Waves and Applications (Sp 2022) — Professors Luca Daniel & Kevin O'Brien.
MIT 6.644 Quantum Measurement and Control (Fa 2021) — Professor Kevin O'Brien.
MIT 6.011 Signals, Systems, and Inference (Sp 2021) — Professor George Verghese & Dr. Peter Hagelstein.
UW Madison ECE 210 Intro to Electrical Engineering (Fa 2013-Sp 2015) — Professor Giri Venkataramanan.
Museums
UW Madison L.R. Ingersoll Physics Museum (Su 2014-Sp 2015) — Manager Steve Narf.Research & Development
I have been blessed with opportunity to contribute to a wide variety of projects in a wide variety of domains including: electrical engineering, physics, human vision, computer vision, robotics, signal processing, and more.
Datasets
SurfaceGrid: (Almost) a million images for learning shape from surface contours [LINK] from 2021 Toward Automatic Interpretation of 3D Plots [PAPER].Development Highlights
Concept development & trade studies for a Lunar Ascent Camera (Su 2023) for Mission Systems Engineering & Integration at Blue Origin — Supervisor Alex Miller, PhD & Manager Scott Gahring.Design & prototype of a Rocket Engine Health Monitoring System (Su 2017) for DreamChaser Propulsions at ORBITEC (now Sierra Space) — Supervisor Scott Munson & Manager Chip Sauer.
Project management for a CubeSat Deployment System (Sp 2013) for InterEgr 160 Engineering Design at UW Madison — Instructors Scott Munson & Chip Sauer.
extended project list coming soon...
Research 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 |