About.

I'm an electrical engineering student at Michigan State. Almost everything I work on lives close to the hardware: analog front ends, the firmware sampling them, and the unglamorous work of turning a physical signal into a measurement you can actually believe.

Most of my time goes to two labs. In Dr. Wen Li's Microtechnology Lab I detect heavy metals at trace concentrations using voltammetry. I've run more than a thousand of these experiments on carbon-fiber and boron-doped-diamond electrodes, but most of my effort goes into the instrument rather than the chemistry: writing the Teensy firmware, debugging the potentiostat boards, and pushing a low-cost microfluidic version toward continuous sensing at 10 ppb. Trace measurement is unforgiving. At those currents, noise and settling time and ground routing stop being details and start deciding whether the reading exists at all.

The other lab is Professor Thomas Clark's RF-photonics group, where I build the digital-communications chain on GNU Radio and a USRP B210. So far that means pulse shaping, symbol-timing recovery, and modulation up through 256-QAM, and I'm working toward OFDM now. Timing recovery is the part that taught me the most, mostly by going wrong in ways that weren't obvious.

I'm on two teams as well. On MSU Solar Car Racing I'm on the Vehicle Controls and Sensing subteam, doing PCB work and STM32 firmware for the lighting and CAN signals now running on the car. For the IEEE MSU Student Branch I'm the technical director, which mostly means designing boards and teaching workshops that get other undergrads from a blank schematic to working firmware in a single session.

Outside all of that I love building. So far I have a RISC-V processor in Verilog that runs compiled C on an FPGA, a Game Boy emulator accurate enough to pass the timing-test ROMs, a fixed-point noise-cancellation engine, and a few others. Some work better than others, but as long as I can learn something I consider that a success.