My mission is to make a meaningful contribution to the advancement of Robotics, Software and AI technologies at a product level, and to inspire others to do the same.

I started in mechanical engineering and ended up with a PhD in materials engineering from UBC. Most of my research was about understanding why things fail, which, looking back, turned out to be pretty good training for everything that came after.

In 2018 I joined Sanctuary AI as one of the first engineers. In the early days, a small group of us built the engineering organization from scratch. I worked on the mechanical design of the robot, mostly the hands, and that work led to a couple of U.S. patents. Later, I proposed and built the Controls Engineering department, grew a multidisciplinary team, and led the programs behind the robot's real-time control system and its ability to walk.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stepped away to build Atrasim — a corrosion prediction platform I'd been developing with a colleague since grad school. We had strong interest from major utilities, but COVID hit right as we were getting started and the market disappeared overnight. It didn't work out, but it taught me a lot about timing, resilience, and knowing when to move on.

After six years at Sanctuary, I took some time off, mentored startups through Innovation UBC, invested in early-stage companies and spent a lot of time thinking about what was next. That led me to found Embodi, a company focused on data infrastructure for training robots. I led the company for about a year and a half, raised a seed round, and pitched to over 100 investors. I recently stepped down for family reasons, but I'm proud of what we built.

I like working with people who care about what they're building. I try to share what I've learned, through publications, mentorship, and just being open about the wins and the hard lessons.