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Hello! Welcome to my (abbreviated) portfolio. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at MIT in the department of mechanical engineering working on reactive metal power systems for ad hoc emergency electricity and desalination. I recevied my PhD also from MIT in August 2021. My research generally focuses on how to make life better and more sustainable in the anthropocene. I am also a pianist, composer, and arranger based in Cambridge, MA and love to collaborate on all things science, art, and music! Feel free to reach out.


Research

See my CV for detailed info and list of publications.

I began my academic career as a roboticist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where I worked on many things, including new software architecture for reconfigurable robotic systems, the Mars Sample Return Program, Mars 2020, and aluminum-powered Europa landers. I also helped drive this thing around.

Now at MIT, my research focuses on solving the problems that are caused by and contribute to climate change. I've been thinking about these problems since I was in high school, when I worked on carbon sequestration at Rutgers University. My latest project extracts energy from aluminum debris to power emergency desalination and electricity generation. My work also digs into the thermodynamics and materials science of using aluminum-water reactions to generate hydrogen and heat from waste aluminum.

My work is currently supported by a J-WAFS Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions (press release), a Martin Family Society Fellowship for Sustainability, and the Hugh Hampton Young Fellowship.

Teaching

Since 2017, I have been a TA/instructor for 2.013/2.014, one of the capstone MechE design classes at MIT. When I took the class as an undergrad in 2014, we built a 3 kW hydrogen fuel cell power system that runs on recycled aluminum (paper). In the past few years, our students have completed the following projects:

Outreach

I am currently a project course instructor with MOSTEC, a program offered by the MIT Office of Engineering Outreach Programs for rising high school seniors from underrepresented and underserved communities across the US. The course I developed, called "Thermodynamics and Climate Change", provides an introduction to thermodynamics and uses the principles learned to look deeper into the causes of climate change and various potential mitigation strategies. Students complete groups projects in which they each analyze and simulate one such strategy. This is 100% the class I wish I had taken in high school.

Music

I am a firm believer that the solutions to many of the world's problems lie at the intersection of technology, art, and culture. To that end, here are some recent projects I have worked on:

Some of my other recent compositions and music projects:

For everything else, check out my SoundCloud, Instagram, and YouTube.

Art

I also design and build various things for mostly aesthetic purposes: