About

Born in Iran, where my parents were denied education beyond their primary years. They brought our family to the United States in 2007 so my sister and I would have the opportunities they did not. I picked up English quickly, found that most subjects opened up if I pushed at them, and graduated from the International Baccalaureate programme at Mira Loma High School.

Choosing a major came down to one question: which discipline lets me work on how things actually fit together? Computer engineering was the only answer that covered all of it. I started at California State University, Sacramento, and finished at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where the learn-by-doing culture suited how I work.

At Cal Poly I ran research on drone platforms and on using natural language processing to control them by voice, work that ran under a US Navy programme. I became Lab Manager at the Reconfigurable Space Computing Laboratory, supporting fourteen concurrent projects entered into the NASA MINDS competition against Artemis mission objectives.

My own project there was MANEE, a multi-configuration adaptive navigator: a drone with a servo-driven arm that adjusted thruster pitch and position so the airframe could reshape itself for tight spaces. As project lead I owned the system design and integration, the CAD, and the fabrication, including CNC-machined carbon fibre and resin-printed parts.

Professionally I now work on image sensor systems: characterisation, test infrastructure, and the analysis tooling around production sensor programmes. It is a different discipline from the drone work, and holding both is the point. Being useful across several domains has consistently been worth more than being expert in exactly one.