I build machines that make things, and agents that help work out what to make next.

I am a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, working in the Mechanosynthesis Laboratory on wire arc additive manufacturing. My research follows one chain of cause and effect: how a process parameter sets the microstructure, and how that microstructure decides whether the finished part holds. I print in nickel aluminum bronze, the alloy ship propellers are cast in, and Inconel 625. What I chase through all of it is residual stress, locked in bead by bead as the metal cools. It can pull a part out of tolerance the moment it comes off the build plate, or wait years and open a crack at sea.

I finished my SM at MIT in May 2026 with a 5.0 GPA on the Thomas W. Folger Departmental Fellowship, after an undergraduate degree at Dalhousie University where I graduated with the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering Gold Medal for the highest GPA in my class.

The other half of my work is automated and agentic discovery. Manufacturing research is bottlenecked by how fast a human can run the design-experiment-learn loop, and I am interested in what happens when agents run parts of that loop themselves — proposing candidate materials and process parameters, driving the simulation and the tooling, and reading the results back. At the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing I co-authored a study of where that already works in practice, drawn from more than thirty interviews with people building agents and people running factories.

Before graduate school I spent five years in co-op roles that were intentionally a broad tour of hard engineering: harness hardware at Tesla, naval thermal analysis at Lockheed Martin, space robotics at MDA, vehicle dynamics at BRP, and vaccine cold-chain R&D at B Medical Systems. The through-line is that I like problems where a simulation has to survive contact with a physical object.

Outside the lab I busked fiddle at the Halifax Seaport Farmers Market every Saturday for ten years, raising over $10,000 for the IWK Children's and Women's Hospital and more than $5,000 for Movember. I released a solo CD in 2018, and I once won the Maritime Fiddlers Contest novelty category playing duets with robots — which is on-brand. These days I race dragon boats in Boston, write code, and design things that go fast.