Experience

SpaceX — Starship Structures Engineer

May – August 2024 · Starbase, TX

Between my time at JPL and starting my PhD, I spent the summer at SpaceX in Starbase, Texas as the responsible engineer for the Block 2 Starship payload door structure. The work moved fast because of a tight feedback loop: I iterated the structural design against manufacturability with the mechanical design engineers, wrote the work instructions for the technicians who built it, and folded their shop-floor feedback back into the design. I ran preliminary structural analysis in Abaqus through the ANSA/META package, and two full 24-foot door weldments were built during my time there. I also designed a tool for installing and temporarily fixturing both 16-foot payload barrel feedlines.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory — Robotics Mechanical Engineer

August 2023 – April 2024 · Pasadena, CA

I led the mechanical effort for a three-week field test of JPL’s Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) snake robot on the Canadian Athabasca Glacier, a terrestrial analogue for the icy moons of Enceladus and Europa. On site I handled mechanical repairs and modifications, set up electronic ground-support equipment, reconfigured hardware between runs, and guided the safe transport and handling of the robot.

Back in the lab, I built the supporting hardware that made that testing possible: a mobility-screw swapping gantry that cut downtime by 70%, an 8-foot vertical-climb testbed, and a lightweight, field-transportable stand for the 40 kg climbing robot. I also upgraded the ~2 m vertical-climbing snake robot for a ~50% reduction in power consumption while improving its climbing ability and reliability, formulated preliminary thermal concepts for a Mars-sample-tube-sized lunar sensor package, and stood up a system for cryogenic dynamometer testing of robotic actuators.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory — Internships

March 2022 – June 2023 · Pasadena, CA

Before my full-time role, I interned across three JPL groups over a year and a half.

Robotics Engineering Intern — Extreme Environment Robotics (347C)

September 2022 – June 2023

Under Matt Gildner, I designed, built, and documented testbeds for the EELS project, which uses actuated screw profiles along its length to move across ice. I built a pair of parallel pivoting ice walls sized to fit a walk-in freezer for developing EELS’s vertical-mobility algorithms, iterated a screw-mobility testbed for gathering data on Archimedes-screw locomotion, and designed an apparatus that lets one person swap the robot’s mobility screws far faster than before.

Mechanical Engineering Intern — Electronic Packaging Group (356B)

June 2022 – August 2022

Under Albert Rieck, I learned Siemens NX and used NX NASTRAN to design and analyze a pull-test setup for proof-testing the strut bonds that hold up the Focal Plane Electronics board on ESA’s Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) mission.

Mechanical Engineering Intern — Nondestructive Evaluation & Advanced Actuators (355N)

March 2022 – May 2022

My first JPL internship, under Yoseph Bar-Cohen, supported a proof-of-concept linear piezoelectric motor for extremely cold, dusty environments. I modeled the actuator, including hysteresis, in MATLAB and Simulink.

Epirus — Mechanical Engineering Intern

June – August 2021 · Hawthorne, CA

Epirus builds counter-UAS systems that use high-power microwave radiation to disable weaponized drones, burning out their electronics at a distance rather than relying on jamming or nets. I helped lead the mechanical development of an early proof-of-concept for a compact wide-band waveguide chamber, and built a rotatable shipping container for delivering the company’s flagship product to customers. I also made an accurate 1:25 scale model of that product (Leonidas) to demonstrate its functions to potential customers, maintained the 3D printers, tested and repaired drones, trained field representatives, and became an FAA-certified Part 107 remote pilot.

Caltech CAST Lab — Summer Undergraduate Researcher

June 2020 – April 2021 · Pasadena, CA

Through Caltech’s SURF program, I worked with the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies on extending satellite lifespans through in-orbit refueling. I designed two systems to demonstrate fuel transfer between the lab’s 3-DoF spacecraft simulators, then derived and simulated the time-varying moment-of-inertia tensor in MATLAB so a spacecraft’s controller could account for the shifting mass during transfer. My final presentation and final report go into more detail.

IBM — Engineering Intern

July – August 2018 · Poughkeepsie, NY

My supervisors Tsung Yeung (left) and Steven Wilson (right).

My first internship was a seven-week stint in IBM Poughkeepsie’s SSD/Flash/Memory Development Lab, where I used 3D printing, CAD, and basic electronics to improve how the team tested storage modules. I built drive-block and cooling fixtures, repaired and upgraded two 3D printers with printed parts and a custom relay circuit, and closed the internship with a six-minute presentation that earned the Inventor/Innovation award. I worked under Tsung Yeung and Steven Wilson.

Teaching — Caltech

2022 – 2023 · Pasadena, CA

Teaching assistant for four mechanical-engineering courses:

• Engineering Design Laboratory (ME72ab) — built an FRC-style robotics competition for five teams over two terms; supported 30+ students in design, machining, electronics, and programming.
• Design & Fabrication (ME14) — mechatronics, GD&T, gear-train design, and fabrication; 40+ students.
• Introduction to Robotics (ME8) — building and programming 3-DoF HEBI arms with SolidWorks, Python, and ROS; 60+ students.
• Mechanical Prototyping (ME13) — lathes, mills, waterjets, laser cutters, and 3D printers.

RobotElite Summer School — University of Southern Denmark

August 2026 (upcoming) · Odense, Denmark

Selected for RobotElite, a three-week international summer school of 50 students covering advanced robotic-system design and entrepreneurship across collaborative, mobile, and manipulation robotics.

MIT Marine Robotics Summer School — MIT–Portugal

July 2025 · Faial Island, Azores, Portugal

One of 12 MIT students, alongside 12 from Portuguese universities, in a two-week marine-robotics program of lectures, ocean-science labs, and field work. In a team of four, I assembled a remotely operated vehicle, implementing a lightweight underwater trash-detection model on a Raspberry Pi and building a servo-actuated gripper.