Engineer, founder & operating leader
I’ve been drawn to building physical systems for as long as I can remember—starting in my family’s garage, where I built a gas turbine from scratch and a working distillation column using laboratory glassware my uncle brought over from his job at the Salk Institute. That curiosity carried me through Engineering Science and nuclear engineering coursework at UC Berkeley and into a sixteen-year career designing scientific instruments, scaling manufacturing operations, and building companies from the ground up.
Outside of work, I live with my wife, Jasmine—a chemical engineer—and our three rescue dogs (two Belgian Malinois and a husky: Suzi, Mina, and Halo). Around our house, the running joke is that Jasmine supplies the vision and I figure out how to build it—whether that means renovating our hillside home, building a tree-house patio under the pine tree, or heading out into the backcountry for field geology and trail hikes.
Watching Visual Acoustics, the documentary about architectural photographer Julius Shulman, got me hooked on mid-century modernism, and Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House—Case Study House No. 22—became the central inspiration for the renovation of our home in San Diego.
Before touching a wall, I drew plans and built physical scale models to test how different room, kitchen, and multi-level deck layouts sat on the slope. After working alongside architects, contractors, and lighting designers on the structural remodel, Jasmine and I still treat the property as an ongoing design-build project—from building an elevated patio under our pine tree for Friday nights to spending weekends on woodworking, courtyard drainage, and leveling brick pavers.
The gallery includes early models, photographs from the renovation, the finished rooms, and the deck at sunset.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: The Stahl House overlooking Los Angeles, with glass walls beside a swimming pool.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Early architectural model showing the house, decks, trees and garden on a sloping site.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Cutaway kitchen model with cabinets, an island and people showing scale.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Living room before renovation, with carpet, a timber ceiling and older sliding glass doors.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Renovated living room with a timber ceiling, new interior finishes and folding glass doors opening to the deck.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Blue lighting tracing the stepped ceiling along a corridor during renovation.The house is available for photo and film shoots.
I really love a good road trip. During COVID, I spent four months on the road and drove 5,800 miles across the American West—from snow on the rim of the Grand Canyon and two-lane red-rock highways in Utah to wild turkeys wandering down a snowy sidewalk in Montana. The coastal stretch from Arcata down to Big Sur was hands down the most picturesque part of the drive, and passing through so much Western water infrastructure along the way sent me down a deep rabbit hole on California watersheds and the engineering history of the Colorado River.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Snow among the orange rock formations of Bryce Canyon.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Snow-covered mountains beyond a snowy field in the Tetons region.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Forest-covered hills and a river near Weott in northern California.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: A concrete arch bridge following the green hills of the Big Sur coast.Spending time in those landscapes sparked an ongoing interest in field geology and mineral prospecting—using public geological surveys and mapping data to pick formations to explore on foot, from backcountry canyons at Dinosaur National Monument with Jasmine to granite trails in San Diego’s East County near Julian with Suzi, Halo, and Mina (usually followed by pizza and apple pie in town).
Whenever Jasmine and I travel through cities instead, we trade trail maps for modern art museums, heavy-music shows, vintage clothing shops, and a running effort to track down the best pizza—a field study now roughly fifty cities deep.
I also paint abstract acrylic canvases—experimenting with bold color fields, layered texture, and fluid composition as a counterweight to the strict tolerances of hardware engineering.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Complete abstract canvas with broad blocks of orange, pink, yellow and black.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Vertical abstract painting with a broad red field and flowing yellow, green and dark-blue forms.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Square abstract painting with large blue and yellow areas flowing into plum and red, with fine marbled lines.I have a long-standing soft spot for deadpan New Yorker cartoons—especially where over-engineered science, nature, and everyday domestic life collide—and a habit of saving lines I want to come back to.
Years ago, when Jasmine and I worked at the same company and she walked past my desk twelve times a day for coffee without looking up, I started pinning a rotating set of esoteric New Yorker cartoons along her path. After two weeks, she finally stopped to ask what one of them meant—and after our first walk to get coffee, where she told me about an obscure protein called Suckerin from her PhD research, I went home that night and created the first Wikipedia article on Suckerin ↗ citing her work.
“A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists”
“Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason.”
“Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.”
“My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.”
“To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”
“To err is human, to blame it on somebody else shows management potential.”
“I don’t have a solution, but I do admire the problem.”
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a flat tire.”
“If you don’t care where you are, then you ain’t lost.”
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”
“Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with”
Browse the complete collection of funny phrases & quotes (PDF)
I’ve designed mechanical, thermal, and electrical hardware for scientific instruments and experimental rigs—using SOLIDWORKS, finite element analysis, and flow simulation to evaluate designs before building them. I’ve also built LabVIEW control and measurement tools, integrated multi-instrument workcells, and led safety certification for commercial launch.
I direct AI coding agents to build custom storefronts, interactive product demonstrations, customer-discovery pipelines, and internal manufacturing software. I write the specifications, design the workflows, test the edge cases myself, and refine the software around how people actually work.
Scaling lab and production operations has meant planning capacity, auditing bills of materials, managing suppliers, and keeping lot and quality records tied directly to the work. I’ve rolled out HubSpot CRM, structured Odoo ERP bills of materials, maintained accounting in QuickBooks and Odoo, and built custom quality software for manufacturing teams.
I work out which customers have an urgent reason to buy, what proof they need, and how their institutions actually purchase—connecting positioning, scientific marketing, unit economics, direct sales, and global distribution agreements.
I’ve founded and bootstrapped companies, raised seed funding, and recruited multidisciplinary teams across engineering, science, and sales. At Eton Bioscience, I stepped in as General Manager and ran the multi-branch laboratory-services business cleanly through its sale while keeping customers served.
Several roles overlapped.
Director of Engineering Innovation, 2021–2022; Senior Director of Oligo Synthesis, 2022–2023; General Manager of Telesis Bio’s Eton Bioscience subsidiary, 2023–2024.
Co-founder & founding CEO; remained on the board through January 2023.
B.S. in Engineering Science, UC Berkeley, 2008.
My research and invention work includes co-authored combustion studies, named inventorship on granted patents and published patent applications, and drafting and filing provisional patent applications.
At UC San Diego, I designed the equipment and automated experiments used to investigate flame behavior. I contributed to publications and conference presentations, with scientific collaborators contributing interpretation and numerical modeling.
I also run an active surplus store on eBay.
Tell me what you want to build, decide, or improve.