I work on energy — how it's produced, stored, and transmitted.
Currently at Commonwealth Fusion Systems,
where I spend a lot of time thinking about critical mineral supply chains for bringing fusion to the grid. Before that,
I built and led R&D collaborations with
Google DeepMind,
NVIDIA,
A*STAR ,
and DIFFER.
Before fusion I worked on power grids at
Hitachi Energy
and Eversource Energy.
At Eversource I created a novel AI-powered inspection platform,
SmartInspect .
I also build things: simulation solvers, games, apps, and lately, better espresso.
Projects
Grid Tycoon JS
I built this because I wanted an interactive way to learn how the grid operates
— the kind of thing you read about in news and books but rarely get to
experience directly. Grid Tycoon is a browser-based simulation game where you
play as an energy source, participating in grid dispatch. I wanted players to feel the
tension between baseload reliability and renewable intermittency without needing
an energy economics degree. The game is meant to be an educational tool for developing
an appreciation for the energy-power world.
Coffee Crew JS
I built this because I was keeping notes about coffees I'd tried in a messy
spreadsheet and wanted something better. Coffee Crew is a tracking and discovery
app that lets you log coffees, tasting notes, and roasters, and find what's
worth trying next. It started as a personal tool and became something I thought
others who take coffee seriously might want.
I built this as a research tool for modeling how gases move through multi-region
systems — solids, fluids, and membranes — in a physically consistent
way. The applications I had in mind were membrane desalination and reverse osmosis processes,
dehumidification for HVAC, and tritium transport through fusion blankets systems.
Built on OpenFOAM 13, the library handles Arrhenius temperature-dependent
transport, McNabb–Foster trapping kinetics, and thermodynamically consistent
interface conditions. I released it as an open-source addon because I couldn't
find a validated, publicly available solver that covered this combination of
physics.
fresnelvoltaics Python
I built this to study concentrated photovoltaic systems that use Fresnel lenses
to focus sunlight onto small, high-efficiency solar cells. The core question was
how optical design choices — lens geometry, focal length, acceptance angle
— translate into electrical performance under real-world conditions. I used
ray-tracing simulations coupled with cell performance models to map the design
space. The work grew directly out of my research on solar concentrators at
Virginia Tech and gave me a way to test ideas that didn't fit neatly into a
journal paper.
transformerEM Python
I built this to model the electromagnetic behavior of distribution transformers
— specifically, to understand how field distributions change under different
loading conditions and winding configurations. The tool generates 3D meshes of
transformer geometries and runs electromagnetic finite element simulations,
producing field maps that lumped-circuit models can't resolve. It came out of
work I was doing at Hitachi Energy on transformer design and helped me answer
questions about leakage flux and core losses that couldn't be addressed
analytically.
I built these because learning OpenFOAM from scratch is unnecessarily hard.
The documentation is dense, the community forums are scattered, and most
tutorials assume you already know what you're doing. I put together a series of
step-by-step videos covering case setup, meshing, boundary conditions, and
solver selection — with all case files in a public repository so viewers
could follow along and modify. The tutorials have been used by students and
engineers in over 40 countries.
Research
- 2025 Accelerating the fusion workforce in the USA
- 2024 US–UK fusion energy collaborations in the digital space
- 2023 Role of Hydrogen in energy transition: opportunities and challenges from technical and economic perspectives
- 2019 Study of PEM fuel cell end plate design by structural analysis based on contact pressure
- 2019 Making simulations easy for engineers
- 2017 Analysis and design of direct contact membrane distillation
- 2017 Coupled thermal and optical analysis of a planar waveguide concentrator-receiver
- 2016 Investigations on Solar Powered Direct Contact Membrane Distillation
- 2014 Effect of vibrations on performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells
- 2014 Structural analysis of solid oxide fuel cell under externally applied compressive pressure
Curated reading list
Books
- The World for Sale Javier Blas
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire Kyle Harper
- Pieces of the Action Vannevar Bush
- Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge Niels Bohr
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ben Horowitz
- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics Carlo Rovelli
Articles
- The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told Wired
- Poker and the Psychology of Uncertainty Wired
- Boston's heat islands turn lower-income neighborhoods from hot to insufferable Boston Globe
- Buried Secrets The New Yorker
- The Friendship That Made Google Huge The New Yorker
- When Britain and France Almost Merged Into One Country The Atlantic
- Stephen Curry Is The Revolution FiveThirtyEight
- A Reporter's Journey Into How the U.S. Funded the Bomb New York Times
- Toto Wolff, the Compulsive Perfectionist Behind Mercedes's F1 Team The New Yorker
- Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine Vanity Fair