Industrial Interests

I am a technological frontiersperson — a professional generalist. I tackle diverse problems through modeling, instrumentation, and software development. My habitat lies in between the disciplines, injecting creativity into stubborn problems that resist solution and blazing a trail where best practices are not yet articulated. I am available for both contract projects and long-term commitments.

Some areas of particular interest:

Laboratory automation for synthetic biology and drug development
Biological modeling and bio-design automation
Embedded systems for agriculture, medicine, and drone defense

I have a wide range of hands-on experience, in firmware, back-end systems, and hardware integration, and from biophysical modeling to circuit design to kernel hacking to AI and scripting languages, with a touch of wet lab bio on the side. But, technology changes fast. More important than any particular skill is the ability to learn quickly, to draw on general principles, to be ready pick up problems anywhere in the stack.

Creativity isn't simply a problem of high throughput generate-and-test, or even combinatorial chemistry of ideas... It's about discovering, mastering, and applying powerful heuristics about how systems work — about cleverly shaping your hypothesis generation to conquer the curse of dimensionality in the space of ideas. I thrive on critical, challenging problems that demand multidisciplinary inspiration and multidisciplinary solutions.

Evolutionary biology carries real insights about software compatibility. Immunology can teach deep lessons about security. Developmental biology can provide a foundational paradigm for self-deploying, self-maintaining systems. Statistical mechanics has a remarkable amount to offer on machine learning. I can help your team deliver new perspectives on old problems and timeless solutions to fresh challenges!

Industry experience:

Laboratory & Industrial Automation

Strateos (formerly Transcriptic) - Laboratory device integration and backend engineering: Plate handling, transport, storage, LCMS, sample management, drydown, reconstitution. Top-level orchestration. Scala, C#, Green Button Go, vendor-specific automation languages. (Automation engineer / senior software engineer / tech lead)

Embedded Systems & Sensors

Meta - Firmware for health sensors in multi-SOC wearable consumer devices: PPG, IMU, EMG (firmware engineer)

Meta - XROS - Device driver framework and OS power management for wearable consumer devices (senior software engineer)

Meta - Massively-multichannel, scalable, low-cost in-house power DAQ system (firmware lead)

(Self) - Multichannel, PWM-driven ferrofluid art project (concept, circuit & PCB design, firmware)

Power / Thermal

Meta - XROS - OS power management policy (senior software engineer)
Patent #US-12632308-B2

Meta - Massively-multichannel, scalable, low-cost in-house power DAQ system (firmware lead)

Meta - Microcontroller power troubleshooting for wearable consumer devices (firmware engineer)

Biophysical Modeling

Meta - Calorie burn modeling and PPG heart rate algorithm integration (firmware engineer)

Tufts University - Bioelectric-electrophoretic tissue model (NumPy/SciPy) and distributed genetic algorithm search harness (research contractor)

MIT - Coarse-grained soft body epithelial tissue model (parallelized C++) for developmental algorithm research (research assistant / postdoctoral associate)

Swarm Control

Strateos (formerly Transcriptic) - Central control algorithm for multi-loop linear motor rail system with 100+ carrier vehicles (senior software engineer)

MIT - Distributed control algorithms for motile cells in deformable tissue models (research assistant / postdoctoral associate)

Application & Driver Compatibility, Recovery

Microsoft - Windows 7 - System service & data analytics quantifying third-party app dependencies on undocumented system interfaces (summer intern)
Patent #US-8776027-B2

University of Washington - Nooks for NT - Transparent device driver isolation and recovery for Windows (undergraduate research assistant)

Generalist SWE

Google - AdSense for Content backend performance optimization (summer intern)

Intel Research (Seattle) - Palm mobile research app devlopment (summer intern)

Amber Z. Brodsky

PhD (MIT, 2014)