NASCAR summary:
My mission is to see synthetic biology reach its industrial potential of creating atomically precise, infinitely scalable tools that define the next era of physical technology.
I am the founding co-Director of Homeworld Collective with my dear friend Paul Reginato. Homeworld exists to develop the field of climate biotech into a hyperproductive community.
I post essays and explore ideas in my personal blog Punk Rock Bio.
I tell my story as an arc of building skills that continually exposed me to new and exciting opportunities. Engineering took me to computer science, computer science took me to neuroscience, neuroscience took me to synthetic biology, synthetic biology took me to working on climate. Along the way I’ve learned to think like a designer, an entrepreneur, an investor, a scientist and an engineer.
I completed my (second attempt at a) PhD in September 2021 under Professor Ed Boyden at MIT. In addition to Ed, George Church and Sebastian Seung were in my PhD committee. My PhD thesis was to develop hybrid experimental and computational tools to create richer datasets of the brain. We published our spatial sequencing technology in Science in January 2021 that can resolve individual RNA molecules inside the original tissue.
Before enrolling at MIT, I was a Research Scientist in the Neuroscience Group at the Simons Center for Data Analysis (SCDA, but now renamed to the Flatiron Institute) in New York City. This was a subgroup of the Simons Foundation, a nonprofit founded by the philanthropic mathematician billionaire Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies (the first and best quant hedge fund). SCDA's mission then is to build computational tools+collaborations for neuroscience and genomics. Here I had the opportunity to work directly with Sebastian Seung, a leader in computational neuroscience. This is where I started my work on building richer datasets in biology, and the SWITCH paper was published in Cell in November 2015.
Before returning to science in 2014, I was the CTO and co-founder of Mobile Data Labs, a start-up focused on building the best next-generation apps for business. The company's first entry to market is MileIQ, a mobile service that automatically tracks and classifies every mile that the user drives. Since launching in 2013, MileIQ has been the top grossing app in the Apple App Store and is now a vibrant team backed by Silicon Valley's best investors. In November 2015, Mobile Data Labs was purchased by Microsoft and continues to thrive.
Prior to Mobile Data Labs, I was an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at IDEO, the global design firm which brought forth the Apple computer mouse and the first laptop. While at IDEO, I co-lead the team produced an award-winning app in a joint venture with Sesame Street. I was selected as an EIR by IDEO while enrolled at Stanford in a PhD program focusing on AI and Computer Vision - I left the program early, earning an MS in Electrical Engineering.
I was also an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at StartX, the Stanford student startup accelerator, and a proud engineering alumni of Harvey Mudd College (BS) and Stanford University (MS).
In addition to pursuing mastery in climate biotech, I am a proud parent, an improving Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu blue belt, a decent surfer, climber and backcountry snowboarder, and a willing off-the-couch marathoner.
"Create more value than you can capture" - Tim O'Reilly