Backstory

I grew up in the mountains of San Bernardino, California, and on my grandparents’ farm in Riverside. I was endlessly fascinated by salamanders, bugs, and how physical matter in living systems behaves so differently from matter in nonliving ones. This curiosity inspired me to imagine how life might take shape through radically different evolutionary paths in environments we can’t yet imagine.

In my early career, I explored meaning through music, especially by playing the piano. Later, I pursued meaning through studying the physical dynamics of space and time, eventually joining Sara Walker’s lab to explore concepts from origins of life, astrobiology, and artificial life. These ideas continue to shape the future I want to help create, where life and technology co-evolve in more creative and inclusive ways.

I often wonder how our lives would be shaped if we understood biology as precisely as we understand physics and chemistry. Today, we lack the equivalent of special relativity for biological evolution. We need a new mathematical framework for life itself. As Richard Feynman once said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” That spirit guides the methodology of artificial life: if we can recreate truly living systems from scratch, then maybe we can understand biology deeply enough to design new technologies inspired by it.

I’ve always been driven to build things the world is missing — from open-access technologies to community spaces where people can bring their full selves. I also wanted to understand how research is transformed into real, tangible technologies that people actually use, so I became involved in several startups to study how organizational structures and healthy communities can produce transformative technologies. Over the years, I’ve contributed to ten startup ventures and cultivated communities rooted in creativity, inclusivity, and collective curiosity.

Beyond research, I love playing and composing piano music, working with soft pastels, photography, getting lost in the woods, lucid dreaming, exploring decentralized technology, and, of course, science fiction.