Advising

No personal accomplishment has brought me as much satisfaction and excitement as I have experienced as an advisor to a group of amazingly divergent, bright, and socially-minded students. It has become a personal imperative for me to find ways to support these students in their pursuit of affecting positive and inclusive change in the world. Below is some information about the students I have been lucky enough to work with over the years.
  • George Varnavides – Materials Science and Engineering, BS 2016
    • George is an exceptionally independent thinker and would come to me for technical advisement for projects such as deploying a phone app that could be used to take a picture of a wall to detect the stress and staring present in the architecture.
  • Mark Vrablic – Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, BS 2019
    • Mark and I worked on a software framework for publishing video games using the Unity game engine and Microsoft Kinect that would include natural gestures. The platform supports games that are built in HTML5 or Unity.
  • Emma Vargo – Materials Science and Engineering, BS 2017
    • Emma and I worked togetheron an algorithm that used an adaptive mesh search algorithm for the inverse design of photonic crystals.
  • Michael Kaminsky – Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, BS 2020
    • Michael and I worked on algorithms and data analysis of learning analytics data based on the platform that I had built for teaching coding in the context of specific disciplines.
  • Burhan Azeem – Materials Science and Engineering, BS 2018
    • Burhan and I worked on organizing and deploying educational software tools for teaching materials science concepts through computation and visualization.
  • Jin Wu – Integrated Design and Management, MBA 2017
    • Jin and I have been working together to develop a portable Braille display technology that would offer the full experience of reading Braille without the bulk of a traditional refreshable Braille display.
  • Emma Nelson – Machanical Engineering, MS 2017
    • Emma and I worked together to form a plan to franchise and grow the Assistive Technology hackathon from an MIT event to a sustainable international effort.
  • Peniel Argaw – Computer Science and Engineering, MEng 2018
    • Peniel, Suyash, and I worked on using machine learning to perform speech recognition for a person with severe dysarthria (speech impediment).
  • Suyash Fulay – Computer Science and Engineering, MEng 2018
    • Suyash, Peniel, and I worked on using machine learning to perform speech recognition for a person with severe dysarthria (speech impediment).
  • Beth Hadley – Computer Science and Engineering, BS 2015
    • Beth and I worked on data analysis and interface design of a software platform for engaging students in quantitative self-reflection in order to facilitate metacognition and bolster learning.
About Me
I am currently a Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. I teach computational materials science, human-centered design, and engineering technology that helps people with disabilities. I am not very active on social media, but you can find some digital breadcrumbs on the following sites:
  > LinkedIn
  > GitHub