Physicist and aerospace engineer, writing software for quantum computer fabrication in Santa Barbara. Plotted here as a trajectory, from the Santa Barbara coast, past the Moon, to a comet.
I've always been drawn to the void. Not to the emptiness, but to the size of it: wide open spaces, the dark between the stars, the feeling of standing at the edge of something far too big to take in at once. Space is the love that has stayed with me longest.
What keeps me moving is curiosity. Nature is stranger than anything we could invent, and every time I understand a small piece of it, the next question is already waiting. It feels like a story whose next chapter is lying open, just waiting to be read. The same curiosity points inward, too: I keep looking at myself honestly, trying to become a better human being.
I grew up in Los Angeles, studied physics at UC Santa Barbara and aerospace engineering at Stanford, and have lived in Oslo, Seattle, Geneva and Mountain View since. Santa Barbara is home now. By day I write software for the machines that test quantum chips. The rest of the time I build things: maps of asteroids, plans for cities on the Moon, and whatever the 3D printer is making this week.
I think we're all searching for something, out there or in here. This site is my notebook of the search so far. If you're looking too, I'd love to hear what you've found.
Goals reached 2026
Publications · with Google Quantum AI and collaborators
Six papers in Nature, one in Nature Physics, one in Science.
Preprints
Research
Education
The longest stretch of the flight, and the home for essays. The first ones are being written; each will appear here as a waypoint on the coast to the Moon.
Zero-gee humanoids
Low Earth orbit · MuJoCo · Unitree G1
A Unitree G1 humanoid, all 29 joints, simulated in MuJoCo inside a 5 × 3 × 3 m station module. It turns itself over the way a falling cat does, with zero net angular momentum (twist, somersault, cartwheel), then pushes off, glides and catches a handrail across the module.
Lunar Cities Atlas
NASA LOLA · Kaguya · Diviner · Leaflet · three.js
Where should the first cities, roads and relays on the Moon go? Sunlight, permanent shadow and Earth visibility at both poles are ray-traced from LOLA laser altimetry. Least-cost highways connect ten sites, from a capital on the rim of de Gerlache to the Marius Hills skylight, with roads out to the ice in Shackleton, Haworth and Cabeus. A relay-constellation designer and design notes cover the rest: radiation, the 354-hour night, dust, and what a road crest does to a rover at one-sixth g.
Open the atlas ↗
Lunar Lava Tubes
LRO Narrow Angle Camera · Kaguya · interactive 3D
Caves under the Moon's lava plains. Real orbital photos of skylight pits and rilles, pinned to their places on a lunar map: eight sites from the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, where LRO radar found a passage leading off the floor in 2024, to Marius Hills and Ingenii. Then a 3D model of a tube beneath a collapsed roof, where you move the Sun and watch the patch of light cross the floor.
Explore the tubes ↗
Lunar MRE
Molten regolith electrolysis · NIST-JANAF
Oxygen from moon dirt. A 0-D equilibrium model of molten regolith electrolysis: sweep the cell potential across high-titanium mare, low-titanium mare and highland soil, and track how much oxygen comes out, what metal alloy is left, and the energy per kilogram.
Asteroid Atlas
1,635 asteroids · DAMIT · JPL SBDB · three.js
Every asteroid with a 3D shape model, plus five comets and the dwarf planets, on one interactive map. Pick a body to see its tumbling shape, orbit and spectral type, and the cheapest launch windows from 2027 to 2050, found by a Lambert porkchop search. Eros comes out at 6.00 km/s from low Earth orbit, against Benner's published 5.96.
Open the atlas ↗
Mathilde
Asteroid gravimetry · EKF · JAX · NUTS
Mapping what is inside an asteroid from orbit, the way GRACE and GRAIL mapped the Earth and Moon: satellites track each other, and the tiny changes in their ranges reveal where the mass is. Mascon gravity, a filter that estimates satellite states and clocks together, and Bayesian inversion of the interior densities. Its site keeps a technical logbook.
Visit Mathilde ↗
Off the Plate
3D printing · Bambu Lab P1S · 42 projects
Everything I design in code and print at home: clockwork with no motors, lamps that draw the Moon's phases, hardware for the house, and models of real comets and asteroids from spacecraft shape models. Each part is generated by a script, checked in simulation where it moves, and sliced before it reaches the printer.
See all the prints ↗Workshop
Images: Earth from NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble; Moon from NASA LRO maps. Santa Barbara terrain from AWS Terrain Tiles (USGS 3DEP, SRTM), with the coastline traced from Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0.