Aspiring Robotics & Autonomy Engineer | M.S Electrical Engineering Student| B.S Computer Engineering Graduate

I teach K-12 students robotics and coding fundamentals through iCode's hands-on, belt-system STEM curriculum, covering robotics kits, drones, and introductory programming concepts. A lot of the work is translation: taking real-world robotics and embedded systems concepts from my own coursework and research and turning them into age-appropriate, hands-on lessons that build students' technical and problem-solving skills.

I serve as an embedded systems engineer on the integration team for the campus Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project, tasked with unifying independently developed autonomy, ground control station (GCS), and RF subsystems into a shared ROS architecture. Most of the work is coordination as much as code: aligning interface and data-format standards across sub-teams so subsystems built in isolation can actually talk to each other within ROS.

I joined Team Pegasus in January 2025 as an Autonomy Engineer on a Lockheed Martin-sponsored research project building an end-to-end autonomy stack for a UAV. As the project matured and I took on the Autonomy Lead role, I chose to carry it forward as my senior capstone. Leading a team of seven engineers, I designed and integrated an end-to-end UAV autonomy system in C++ and Python on ARM-based embedded Linux (Jetson AGX), progressing from Gazebo SITL simulation through hardware-in-the-loop testing to outdoor field deployment. I bridged the PX4 flight controller to ROS 2 via uXRCE-DDS and integrated LiDAR and ZED X stereo cameras (including GMSL bring-up) into a unified perception pipeline supporting SLAM-based localization and closed-loop control. When hardware-software integration failures surfaced during flight testing, I dug into telemetry logs, traced faults across firmware, OS-level timing, and application software, and resolved them to improve reliability from lab through outdoor flight test.

I lead LiDAR sensor integration for the lab's autonomy stack, designing an STM32-based hardware time-synchronization module that timestamps IMU and LiDAR data against a shared GPS/PPS reference for deterministic sensor fusion. That module feeds an RTOS task pipeline (interrupt-driven PPS capture → sensor read → buffered output) into a custom ROS 2 node that time-aligns IMU and Velodyne VLP-16 point cloud data for downstream perception and SLAM. I also coordinate with the broader autonomy team to identify and scope real-time sensor-sync gaps in the existing perception pipeline, translating them into firmware-level solutions.

I started at Panda Express as a front-of-house crew member and was promoted to shift lead within a year, not because I asked for it, but because I had demonstrated I could keep a team on track during the high-volume hours when everything is moving at once and the margin for error is low. As shift lead I manage the crew, keep quality consistent under pressure, and make real-time decisions that affect how the whole shift runs. The parallels to engineering coordination are more direct than they sound: when a system is under load and something breaks, you have to prioritize fast, communicate clearly, and execute without losing the thread. This job made that second nature in a way that school could not.

As a student worker in the Counseling Department at Crafton Hills College, I supported the front office of academic counseling: greeting and checking in students, scheduling appointments with counselors, and answering first-line questions about course sequencing, general education patterns, prerequisites, and transfer requirements to CSU and UC schools. Academic counselor student workers act as the connective tissue between students and the counseling staff, they help students read their degree audits and educational plans, process routine paperwork like add/drop forms and petitions, and route anything that needs real academic judgment to a credentialed counselor, all while handling student records carefully under FERPA confidentiality rules. A lot of the job was translating a dense, rule-bound system, transfer agreements, prerequisite chains, GE requirements, into something a stressed student could actually act on that day. That skill, taking a complicated system and making it legible to the person who has to use it, is one I still lean on directly in engineering work.

Since 2021 I have owned live AV operations (audio mixing, video switching, and streaming) for a weekly service with a live audience. There is no margin for error in live production: if something goes wrong, it goes wrong in front of everyone, in real time. Over four years of consistent weekly commitment I have built the kind of trust that only comes from showing up and getting it right, week after week. That experience sits directly behind how I think about reliability in engineering. It is not a property you verify in testing but something you have to build into your process from the start.