I’m a 4th PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, working with Professor Grace X. Gu. Before Berkeley I studied mechanical engineering at Purdue, where I first got interested in lattice structures. Most of my doctoral work has involved building binder jetting printers and working on the computational side of lattice design, using AI/ML to optimize structures for various applications by exploiting their tendency to buckle and deform!
With support from H2H8, I’m applying those tools to coral reef restoration. The idea is to print reef structures out of calcium carbonate, the same material corals build their own skeletons from, so that a single structure can both soften wave energy and give coral larvae a surface they can settle on. Right now most of the work is upstream: optimizing the sintering process so the printed structures hold up in seawater, and developing the computational design in parallel. Eventually we hope to build a small flow chamber to check whether the geometries move water the way our models predict.
Outside the lab, I’m a huge aviation geek, and lately I’ve been flying drones and chasing light around the Bay to film. I also watch a lot of Giants baseball.