ABOUT

I've been driven by one question for most of my life: What is consciousness? That question began when I was sixteen. My mother passed away from a brain tumor, and watching someone you love lose their memories, personality, and independence made me wonder whether consciousness could one day be understood, restored, or even expanded.

I started by trying to understand the nature of reality, beginning with the physical world. As a kid, I built everything I could, from Lego Technic trucks and robotic arms to model rockets. In high school, inspired by an article on brain imaging, I built a magnetic levitation system for a science project. That curiosity led me to aerospace engineering, where I learned to think from first principles by designing complex physical systems, starting with propulsion.

Two books shaped my worldview: Abundance by Peter Diamandis andThe Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin. Both argued that abundant clean energy would reshape civilization while stopping climate change. Since then, I've believed that every major leap in civilization starts with an energy revolution, and batteries were the missing piece. After stumbling upon Elon Musk's 2012Wired interview, I knew Tesla was where I wanted to help build that future.

At 27, I moved to California to join Tesla, where I learned how exceptional teams build ambitious hardware with the speed and iteration of software. I designed the Model X battery structure to make battery packs safe, leading to its 5-star crash rating, and helped shape the early Model 3   prototype ahead of 325,000 reservations in the first week. Tesla taught me that bold ideas can transform entire industries and inspired me to build one of my own.

I later returned to Europe as employee #10 at Lightyear, where I led the design of the world's most efficient EV powertrain, enabling a 450-mile range from a 60 kWh battery. We delivered the first production solar electric vehicle, grew to a $400M valuation, and were recognized as one of TIME's Best Inventions.

Those experiences revealed that batteries, not EVs, are the real bottleneck, and the supply of critical materials constrains the energy transition. I founded Universe Energy to make recycled batteries the primary source for the next 100 million batteries. We built robotics, computer vision, and AI to scale battery repurposing into scalable infrastructure, to avoid 6 gigatons of CO₂ emissions by 2050.

Looking back, I realized the hardest problems are not isolated technologies, they are systems problems. The same is true for intelligence. Just as abundant energy transformed civilization, intelligence can expand human potential, but only if it is human-centered, universally accessible, and governed responsibly, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. The next frontier lies where materials, hardware, and AI converge to bring intelligence into the physical world.

Building a company came at a personal cost. Recovering from burnout through Vipassana meditation brought me back to the question that had first inspired my journey: understanding consciousness with the same curiosity I'd once applied to the physical world. I realized we're trying to engineer intelligence without first learning from the most sophisticated system we already have: the human brain.

Today, my focus is the intersection of photonic computing, brain-inspired intelligence, and physical AI. The future of computing won't come from scaling today's architectures, but from building systems that compute more like the brain, combining parallel processing and intuitive reasoning with extraordinary energy efficiency. 

Light already provides computational primitives electronics must approximate: parallel propagation, interference, multiplexing, resonance. I want to build photonic hardware where computation, memory, communication, and learning are co-designed with that physics,  transforming photonics from an accelerator for conventional AI into a physical substrate for adaptive, energy-efficient intelligence. 

The defining technologies of this century will emerge where materials, hardware, light, and AI converge. For me, that's the next step toward a question: how do we build humanistic intelligence that thinks the way the brain does- decentralized, local, regulated, and applied to what we need to solve most: material science, drug discovery, power distribution, and mental health.  

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