I am an engineer that manipulates light, liquid, and machinery to better understand the tiny events that explain biology.  I earned mechanical engineering degrees from MIT (S.B. 2006) and UC Berkeley (PhD 2012), spending many years in laboratories teamed up with some amazing chemists, biologists, physicists, and engineers.  I feel that startups provide agility and clarity of purpose that large institutions lack, so the startup ecosystem is where I currently do my work.

My heart is in the machinery that powers innovation in life science: the valves and pumps, lasers and microscopes, wheels and levers, and the deluge of data and code that glues it all together.  My current position is VP of Instrumentation at 3Scan, where I develop automation tools to extract spatial and molecular information from deep inside biological tissue.

Ultimately, this is a writing project about the relationship between machines and experiments.  Machines make experiments: l cover the tools and techniques that drive advances in life sciences, with special emphasis on those that occupy the rocky transition zone between basic research and commercialization.  But experiments also make machines: experimentation is essential to derisking and commercializing technology. This aids business by accelerating the production of knowledge, anticipating failure, using science to arrive at workable answers quickly and cheaply.  

I hope that my perspectives are informative to a variety of technology professionals: scientists, engineers, managers, educators, and investors in both research institutions and industry.