Throughout my career I have built a broad base of engineering experience to further science. In 1994 as an undergraduate I discovered new properties of electromagnetic wave propagation in structurally chiral media (SCM), quickly followed by extension of that foundation to include coupled electromagnetic and elastodynamic wave propagation in piezoelectric SCM through an NSF Fellowship as a first-year graduate student.

I then spent more than a decade focused on micro- (MEMS) and nano-scale device design and fabrication, including the electrical machinery for the MIT Micro Gas Turbine Generator in my Ph.D. Following Ph.D., I developed and optimized the fabrication process for an interferometer in what was (is?) the smallest commercial NIR spectrometer. The interferometer comprises a tunable Fabry-Perot interferometer made of flip-chip bonded SOI movable- and fixed-mirror chips that include thick-film optics on an integrated curved mirror.

As Director of Probe Development in the metrology division of Veeco Instruments, now a division of Bruker, I invented the SNL™ probe whose characteristics greatly enabled a new PeakForce Tapping™ feedback-control mode that vastly improved measurement precision and also ease of use as an integral part of the Bruker ScanAsyst™ mode. The facility that we created, founded as the Veeco Nanofabrication Center, continues to operate and produce novel probe designs that enable new science.

In 2010, I migrated to biotechnology, leveraging my engineering and mentoring skills to teach while building an understanding of biological processes and equipment. In the Biological Engineering department at MIT I taught MIT 20.309, a hands-on laboratory-based course in precision biological instrumentation focusing on optics, electronics and signals and systems, and 20.345, a companion student-proposed project class. In 20.309 at the time, students built, from scratch, both an epi-fluorescence microscope and a high-sensitivity fluorometer that measured DNA melting curves to teach the basics within any PCR instrument. The performance of these spartan instruments routinely rivaled that of highly-developed commercial instruments.

At Q-State (now Quiver) I led drug-screening electrophysiology data-production for pharma clients, as well as the engineering of the instruments. Along with my staff I built and operated the all-optical electrophysiology Firefly microscope, which at that time could measure and process action potentials from several hundreds of neurons in one FOV, 10s of thousands per day, producing TBytes of movies recording action potentials. I also developed the Swarm high-throughput screening instrument, which measured whole-well electrical responses and was used to screen a 200,000 compound library, in search of candidates for a pain therapeutic, in 25 days.

At Cellino Biotech, as VP of Engineering and Automation, I directed hardware and software development (local and cloud-based) toward high-volume, autologous stem cell manufacturing. I built and developed software for the first prototype system for automated laser-based cell poration and lysis and, collaborating with Cellino biologists, performed the first closed-loop cell culture management experiments, subsequently implementing plate-handling robotics automation to do this at scale. This work was featured in CEO and Co-founder Dr. Nabiha Saklayen’s TED talk on the promise of regenerative medicine.