My life in several link-laden lines
I grew up in the northwest part of
Houston, TX. Graduating from
Cypress Creek High School in 2007, I moved to Nashville, TN to attend
Vanderbilt University. At Vanderbilt, I majored in
Electrical Engineering and
Political Science, and minored in
Engineering Management. I was fortunate to engage in research as part of the Systems Biology and Bioengineering Undergraduate Research Experience (
SyBBURE) and the VU Photonics (
Weiss) group. I worked on a number of projects within these groups, and most notably helped lead the development of a inexpensive, micro-sized peristaltic
pump for use in microfluidic devices (like point-of-care
diagnostics). This pump is currently being
licensed through Vanderbilt's tech transfer office.
After graduating in 2011, I decided to cross the Atlantic and attend the
University of Cambridge for a 1-year masters program. Officially called the Master of Philosophy in Micro- and Nanotechnology Enterprise (and unofficially the
Nano MPhil), this program was a crash course in a huge range of topics, including fabrication and characterization techniques, MEMS, and entrepreneurship. As part of the course I had a chance to consult for
Schlumberger on the impact and potential of
additive manufacturing, and conduct research at
Nokia Research Cambridge in support of Nokia's
Morph initiative. Specifically, I worked on developing fabrication methods for inexpensive high-performance stretchable interconnects (similar to
this) that could be implemented for chip-to-chip routing in flexible and stretchable electronics. The primary application space for such a technology lies in
mobile and
healthcare devices.
In the fall of 2012, I entered the
EECS/Course 6 PhD program at
MIT, joining Professor Martin A. Schmidt's
MEMS research
group. Working out of the Microsystems Technology Laboratory (
MTL), I worked to develop novel, low-cost semiconductor fabrication equipment. It was challenging, yet immensely enjoyable work that let me (/ forced me to) integrate aspects of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and physics, as well as bits of materials science, chemistry, and programming
. In September 2018, I defended my PhD thesis, which was centered around on a low-cost system built to perform
inductively-coupled plasma chemical vapor deposition (ICP-CVD).
