Materials Engineering & Applied AI
Fifteen years solving materials, quality, and regulatory problems in medical device manufacturing taught me exactly where technical teams lose time. Now I build the AI that gives it back: a materials certification pipeline, automated lab reporting that saves our scientists hundreds of hours a year, and a RAG system that answers technical questions straight from the standards. I build for engineers and scientists because I've been both.
About
I see the gap before it's a problem
I started as a lab tech, running tensile tests and prepping metallographic samples, learning how materials behave before I ever managed anyone. The technical foundation matters, but what stuck with me was everything around it: what it's like to be the person doing the careful, detailed work, what gets glossed over by the people relying on it, and how technical expertise turns into results the rest of the business can use. Those lessons shape how I lead now.
That foundation carried me through seven years in medical devices, then to Houston to build a quality system from scratch and get an energy-sector failure analysis lab accredited, and on to A-dec, where I now lead the materials and clinical engineering function for a global dental manufacturing operation.
The pattern across all of it is the same: I see the gap, whether it's a missing lab, no quality system, no process, or no data, and I figure out how to stand it up, prove it works, and make it stick. Sometimes that means pointing the gap out to people who haven't noticed it yet. It's meant building an ISO 17025 quality system from scratch, turning around a plating line that was scrapping nearly nine parts in ten, standing up a BSL-2 microbiology program, and writing the EU MDR strategy for a $140M device portfolio. Lately the gap has been software: my teams were losing days to manual document searches and report writing, so I learned to build the AI tools that give that time back, with a bias toward systems that stay traceable and auditable instead of just demoing well.
The technical work is only half of it. The other half is building the team that carries it further than I could alone: engineers and scientists who trust each other, who stay, and who become the people their colleagues call when something breaks.
I hold a BS in Materials Science & Engineering from the University of Utah, am ISO 13485 auditor trained, and completed Lean Six Sigma Black Belt coursework. I was one of four engineers chosen from 7,500 worldwide to present original research at TE Connectivity's annual conference in Prague.
Areas of Practice
The areas I work in, spanning materials and quality engineering and the AI tooling I build to support them.