A little about me

I'm drawn to tangible products and physical systems: things that have to fit, carry load, move, and survive being used. The most satisfying work for me is R&D: the stage where the design isn't settled yet and you learn by building.

I like problems that cross disciplines. The knee-traction project, for example, needed mechanical architecture, CAD, 3D-printed interfaces, a load cell, and embedded stepper control to work together before any of it could be tested.

I like having a process. My education was built around an engineering design process: understand the people and the problem, define the requirements and constraints, explore more than one concept, evaluate them with decision matrices and analysis, then build, test, and iterate. I still work that way, because it gives me a way to make good decisions when a problem gets complicated.

The process is structured. The path through it usually isn't. A client sits on a prototype and changes the requirements, or a fixture turns out not to represent the system it was built to test. I build early and cheaply so those surprises show up sooner, I want measurements I can trust before I draw conclusions, and when something fails I treat it as information: find what moved, change one thing, and retest.

I use whatever tools fit the problem in front of me: CAD, MATLAB, Excel, physical prototypes, test rigs, and, more and more, AI.

Most of my free time goes to mountain biking, hiking, and camping. I also fly a drone, and I'm Part 107 licensed, so a lot of my photos are taken from above.

And I still do engineering in my free time. My knee-traction prototype started as a side project.