About Me

I am an engineer, researcher, and software developer currently working in quantitative finance. Prior to starting at a hedge fund, I co-founded two consecutive venture backed startups in the SF Bay Area. Previously I started and operated a technical consulting firm that built custom software for clients across a wide range of industries. I have a PhD in Bioengineering jointly from UC Berkeley and UCSF Medical School where I researched minimally invasive ultrasound ablation of cancers 1 2. I also have a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Virginia, where I was a Jefferson and Rodman Scholar.

I started my first company while still an undergraduate at UVA doing volunteer research in the Biomedical Engineering department. I was encouraged to commercialize a product I developed in the lab and have been hooked on startups and product development ever since.

I have had the privilege of building a wide range of software products over my career. Through my consulting company, we pioneered an award-winning music recommendation system3 based on our work on the Netflix Prize. Another internal project was Hayfever4, a pollen and allergy tracking system that attempted to learn what triggered seasonal allergies for users. I later converted this to a chatbot during the NLP revolution of the early 2000s.

Later in my career I had the opportunity to be part of the founding team of two venture backed startups. The first startup focused on social photo sharing (before this was commonplace) and later morphed into a location-aware phone app5 for chat and information. Later we built Soundcheck, a platform for helping businesses get their content onto the voice-based devices of the time.

In 2021 I decided to pivot away from tech and became part of the founding team of Cambrian Asset Management, a quantitative hedge fund. In many ways this pivot actually brought me full circle as it has given me a chance to utilize the math and statistics I spent years studying in graduate school. I will not be sharing much related to this work here. Quant hedge funds are, as you might imagine, quite secretive about their trading alpha.

Footnotes

  1. Graduate research focused on computational modeling of heat transfer in biological tissue. Below is the output of a simulated ablation from a tri-directional ultrasound applicator.

    modelled heat in tissue
    ↩︎

  2. As part of this research we also designed devices to measure the power output of our custom applicators so we could use this in the modeling.

    ultrasound power output
    ↩︎

  3. Hooks for Facebook was a collaborative filtering system that ran on social media to recommend music based on preferences of similar users. Hooks won the 2010 Constant Contact Developer Challenge in the social media category.

    hooks for facebook
    ↩︎

  4. Hayfever was a web and mobile app that monitored pollen levels and tracked users’ seasonal allergy symptoms.

    hayfever
    ↩︎

  5. Peck was originally a mobile app that centered on location-based photo sharing and chat.

    peck
    ↩︎