The things we make, the ways we understand the world, and the questions we ask of it are influenced by histories, cultures, and circumstances. So, too, are the knowledge and technologies available to us: how they are represented, who can access them, and how they circulate through a society influence what people know, create, and come to understand.
My studies in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Redlands gave me a framework for examining these relationships. An earlier curiosity spanning biology and neuroscience to computer science and robotics, nurtured in part at Moreno Valley College's iMake Innovation Center, had drawn me across disciplines. Social and behavioral studies provided a lens through which to examine how people interpret and shape the world around them. Natural and physical sciences, meanwhile, offered me a means of understanding and modeling the world around me.
I carried this perspective into my subsequent work in rapid and functional prototyping. My technical work encompasses archaeological, biomedical, and applied engineering contexts. In these settings, I examine existing objects, investigate their forms, and use digital tools and fabrication methods to translate designs into physical things. My work draws upon computer-aided design, 3D printing, and digital imaging to develop, produce, and evaluate physical objects.
These experiences inform my understanding of technology as both a product of human ingenuity and a record of it. The tools we develop, the objects we construct, and the methods we use to study them embody the knowledge, materials, and conditions from which they emerge—the tangible expressions of how people reason, solve problems, and engage with the world around them.
My interests include how concepts take material form within cultural and environmental constraints, how technologies and artifacts reflect the societies that produce them, and how material culture can be documented, preserved, conserved, and reconstructed.
I am interested in both the methods used to study and care for objects—including digitization, imaging, digital analysis, and spatial modeling—and the insights they offer into the knowledge, materials, and decisions behind their creation. I am also drawn to the independent emergence of similar technologies and ideas in different cultures, and to what these parallel developments reveal about human ingenuity, originality, and the conditions that give rise to invention.
These themes raise questions bridging anthropology and archaeology, materials science and engineering, cognitive science, and the history of science and technology. How do people arrive at new ideas, and what determines which concepts become objects, tools, or systems? Under what circumstances do different societies develop similar technologies independently, and how do we distinguish independent invention from the exchange of ideas? How do technologies change as they move between cultures, communities, and generations? What can we learn by reconstructing objects, recovering lost techniques, or examining the traces left by their manufacture and use?
Digital methods offer ways to investigate places that are difficult to access or where evidence is incomplete. Geographic data, digital elevation models, and imaging technologies can help recover information about landscapes and environments. I am compelled to pursue the study of the material traces of human activity beyond Earth. Spacecraft, instruments, landing sites, and the objects left on other worlds are not only evidence of exploration. They are artifacts of particular times and places, reflecting the knowledge, resources, ambitions, and constraints of the societies that made them.
My broader interests in anthropology, archaeology, fabrication, and digital documentation reinforce this fascination. I hope to bring material analysis, spatial modeling, digital technologies, and historical inquiry together to examine the objects and environments of space exploration as part of humanity’s evolving archaeological record. What interests me most is not simply what humanity will build beyond our planet, but how those things will become part of that record: tangible evidence of how we imagined other worlds, learned to reach them, and began to leave our history there.