About Me

I'm a physicist-turned-embedded-engineer who follows the questions deeper than most people are comfortable with. I ask "why 0.48?" when everyone else says "just use the formula." I've gone from building experiments on the Vomit Comet to calculating Casimir forces on supercomputers to writing Rust on embedded Linux for firetrucks. The thread through all of it is: I want to understand how things actually work, and I want to help other people understand them too.

How I Work

• I'm methodical. I trace problems to their root cause. I let the evidence lead before I jump to conclusions.
• I'm not afraid to say "I don't know," but I'll follow up with "let me figure it out."
• I'd rather have an honest conversation about a weakness than paper over it.

What I Love Doing

Architecting and designing systems. Figuring out the goals, finding the pain points, and putting together current technology to address them. This is why I moved to the IoT team - to design the telematics system from the ground up.

Embedded / bare-metal work in particular. Building up every layer from the hardware up feels like creating art. There's a craft to it that I don't get from higher-level work.

Deep-dive debugging. The kind where you have to understand the whole system to find why it's behaving unexpectedly. Taking data, graphing it, looking for anomalies — then finding the root cause. RTOS task overrunning and corrupting a light cycle timer. Memory map overflow corrupting a linker segment. These are the puzzles I love.

Mentoring. Watching someone else level up — whether it's a grad student discovering field theory or an intern writing their first Rust closure — is genuinely satisfying.

Experience

Embedded Software Engineer / IoT Engineer — Pierce Manufacturing

Appleton, WI | 2020 – Present

Body Controller Software (earlier):

• Maintained and improved body-controller software for firetrucks - the embedded system that controls lights, sirens, ladder, pump, and other firefighting equipment.
• Diagnosed and resolved over-active warnings that were disrupting firefighter operators.
• Implemented missing ladder control behavior that had been sold but never built - traced the gap, designed the fix, shipped it.

IoT Group (later):

• Architected and built a telematics application in Rust running on embedded Linux devices.
• Gathered and transmitted vehicle telematics data (location, diagnostics, status).
• Mentored junior engineers and led interns every summer.

Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) — Union College

Schenectady, NY | 2017 – 2020

Taught intro and advanced physics courses. Supervised undergraduate research across theory, computation, and experiment. During COVID, switched to fully online teaching and discovered a passion for making educational videos.

Note: the tenure-track position at Union College did not end well — I did not make tenure. I am open about this. It taught me that my strengths are in teaching, mentoring, and hands-on engineering — not the publish-or-perish research treadmill.

Visiting Assistant Professor — Lawrence University

Taught intro and advanced physics courses. Supervised undergraduate research in theoretical and computational projects.

Appleton, WI | 2014 – 2017

Postdoctoral Researcher — UC Riverside

2011 – 2014 | Advisor: Professor Roya Zandi

Applied theoretical and computational techniques from high-energy field theory to problems in viral self-assembly.

Ph.D. Physics — University of Oklahoma

2004 – 2010 | Advisor: Professor Kimball Milton

Theoretical and computational physics in high-energy theory. Specialized in HPC with explicit parallelism (OpenMP, MPI) on large clusters.

Skills

Anecdotes

Why physics and not engineering?

I started college as a mechanical engineering student. In a thermo-fluids course, I asked why a heat flow formula used 0.48 as an exponent. The professor said: "Don't worry about where it's from, just use it." That answer — don't worry where it's from — was the opposite of what I needed. I switched majors from engineering to physics shortly after.

The 555 Timer Hackathon

For a NASA microgravity experiment, we needed to record experiments on consumer camcorders with no external trigger. I built a microprocessor + 555 timer that emitted IR signals matching the camcorder's remote protocol. First embedded project. Didn't know it at the time, but this is where I became an embedded engineer.

The Casimir Effect to Viral Self-Assembly Leap

The field-theoretic techniques I used for Casimir calculations applied directly to polymer self-assembly. The math was the same. The physics was wildly different. I pivoted entirely — because I had the techniques, not just the topic knowledge.

The RTOS Light Cycle Bug

Firetruck lights weren't cycling correctly. Not consistently - just sometimes. I graphed timing logs and found a lower-priority RTOS task was overrunning, stalling the light cycle counter. The fix was straightforward - but finding it required understanding the whole system's timing.