Professional

I started at a small medical simulation company in Ohio. After three months of building the models, the founder recognized I understood the process well and gave me some informal training before I moved with the company up to Chicago.

If you've been a startup founder or part of one at its beginning, you can understand the passion it takes. I would often stay at the office for long stretches because my commute was 3.5 hours round trip. With the amount of work to be done, it just made sense not to leave. Once, that meant staying for two weeks straight, but I emphasize this again: passion.

During those days, the ideas just kept coming. This is when I found my rhythm and started making some great products.

Ethicon Pad

My first big success came from a design I made for Ethicon. They wanted a custom skin pad their sales reps could carry to demonstrations. I designed a translucent pad with layered dermis and subcutaneous anatomy, and their logo embedded underneath the skin layer, visible through the material. This allowed the rep to show how the suture operated while under the skin. It became the largest contract the company had landed to that point and would eventually have knockoffs being made overseas. I found that to be flattering to be honest.

Sclerotherapy Pad

The sclerotherapy pad is the project I'm most proud of. The founder had handed this project over to me unsolved. The procedure involves injecting a sclerosing agent into varicose veins, causing them to collapse and disappear. Simulating that visually was a puzzle that went unsolved.

I remembered a mood ring I'd had as a kid and I researched how it worked. I looked up thermochromic pigments, mixed them into silicone, and made hollow vessels with it. When you injected warm liquid, the vessels appeared to vanish, exactly like the real procedure. The medical advisors were thrilled. It was fully reusable: cool it down and it reset completely. Nothing else on the market did what it did, and still does.

Military Skin Suit

Then there was the military skin suit we partnered with other companies on to successfully win a government contract. It was a full-body silicone suit for a sensor-embedded mannequin that had to survive desert field testing. I designed anatomically correct skin sleeves for every segment of the body, a functional mask that moved with the robotic face underneath it, and got the whole thing production-ready. The government tested it in the field. It held up. We won the contract.

Thyroidectomy Trainer — My First U.S. Patent

The Thyroidectomy Trainer came from a collaboration with a physician: a fully modular anatomical trainer with replaceable internal components so the full procedure could be practiced without replacing the entire model after each use. I'm listed as co-inventor on the U.S. patent, having fully designed the model and its manufacturing procedure.

China OEM

As the company grew, we partnered with a manufacturer in China to handle production at scale. I was the one they sent over. I spent a little over a month on-site, training 27 engineers on our manufacturing processes and getting production running. I had a translator who assisted during training, but my trips to the grocery store were always interesting to say the least.

As someone who started as a model maker a few years earlier, I loved the personal growth I was making and was proud of what I had accomplished.

Tall Tree — Going Independent

The company began scaling back US based operations after the China OEM and for years I had a question I would be asked time and time again by customers: Is it reusable? I wanted to make reusable products and not only give the customers what they wanted, but also lessen the environmental impact of our company. At that time, after using the product once, it was trashed and sent to the landfill. The investors and stakeholders prioritized consumerism and profit more than what aligned with my values as I continued to become a young adult and recognize what I felt was important. So I made the decision to start my own simulation company built around environmentally aware manufacturing, product designs, and packaging. I developed a process to grind down used silicone products, blend the resulting pellets back into fresh material, and recast them into new models. The recycled material turned out to be more realistic than the original. That was a side benefit I hadn't expected, and one that proved the instinct right.

With my new company, Tall Tree, I also introduced 3D printing into my design process. A tool that saved me countless hours of labor spent on hand carving designs from clay. I was able to use my 3D modeling knowledge gained in high school and college as a foundation to continue improving and create the models on my computer before sending over to the printer.

I also recognized the value injection molding could provide to my products and after proper research, I secured a CNC router capable of carving molds from aluminum. In addition to the router, I added a plastic injection machine to my workshop. The beauty of this plastic injector was its ability to melt plastic bottles and use them for our products. It aligned perfectly with my company's purpose of being environmentally aware.

Going into its third year, Tall Tree was gaining traction fast. My products were reusable or recyclable and creative. A prototype for the first "self healing" skin pad had just been created and I was testing consumer interest by attending conventions and running demonstrations with it. It was a clever, yet simple design, consisting of a thermoplastic elastomer with a heating element built into its base. Make an incision and practice suturing, turn on the heating element for 5 minutes and watch it heal, then turn it off and let it cool. Unfortunately, a prototype is as far as this design progressed, as well as Tall Tree as a whole, because in early spring of that year is when the COVID pandemic began. Without teaching workshops or demonstrations being performed, there was no longer a need for my products and I had to move on from Tall Tree and the exciting potential it had.

Industrial manufacturing was new territory. My background before this had been small-scale and highly specialized: medical simulation components, OEM setups, a small-batch silicone recycling operation. Nothing at this kind of volume or pace. It proved difficult to show how my skills could extend beyond a niche field like medical simulation, but there were still bills to pay and support I needed to provide my children.

This takes us to my current employer and within eight months I'd reached Level 3 machine operator. I credit this promotion to my constant curiosity and ability to understand a process, even if it's new to me. By paying attention, picking things up quickly, and caring about doing the job right with pride, people began to notice. I have built strong and positive relationships because of the effort I make in everything I do and the compassion I have for others. It's important to me to support and lift those around me in a positive way, because a rising tide tends to lift all boats.

A self driven initiative that seemed to really help my credibility was my creation of a manufacturing process app. My department had no centralized way to digitally track manufacturing orders while being processed, product specs, fault codes, completion status, or shift data in real time. This is in addition to many other metrics that would immediately save time and production costs and also long term costs by tracking key trends over time. I designed and built a solution on my own time: a single-file HTML, CSS, and JavaScript production management app, optimized for mobile use on the factory floor. No assignment, no request. I saw the gap, understood it, and built something that addressed it. Granted, this was with the help of AI and some clever vibe coding, but the app was good. Really good, and has been sent to the proper department for further evaluation and how it can be implemented. Although, since I submitted it, I have noticed similar software and web apps have been created for different departments across the company. I'm glad that if my app did anything, it may have sparked improvements across the company.

Recognize a need, understand why and how it's needed, and build something that performs.

This didn't start as a career move. I was managing a lot and needed leverage, ways to get more done within the same amount of time. Enter the world of automation and iOS shortcuts. I had just created an online brand and e-commerce site as a side project, and automating the site saved me several hours on a weekly basis. It was right around this time that ChatGPT's voice model had just been released and AI tools started becoming genuinely capable. I went deep and stayed there. I've used different models every single day for almost the past 3 years and have witnessed the daily evolution of these models without blinking.

Make.com and Zapier were my primary workflow automation tools when I began and mostly still are. They assist in complex agentic workflows, especially when I want to isolate nodes and agents. Since I started pursuing my passion for AI, I've worked directly with calling models via APIs, hosted models locally, made my own protocols, and built custom interfaces when the right one doesn't exist. I've worked across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Qwen, and many others. I've built with image generation models, open-source hardware configurations, and self-hosted infrastructure including a VPS setup with SSL, Nginx as a reverse proxy, and hardened security settings.

The projects I've built include a multi-platform streaming dashboard with live message translation, a personal productivity system with session-aware scheduling, a decision making protocol I call Fortune Cookie, and a semi-automated job search pipeline backed by a structured database with resume tailoring. Most of these started because I needed them. All of them taught me something I couldn't have gotten any other way.

Years of daily engagement with AI has given me a depth of understanding most people don't have yet. I know how these systems think. I've applied that thinking to protocols, to how information structures itself, to the way problems can be reframed through an AI lens. I've strived to be fluent in the language of AI. First recognizing and understanding how humans often make decisions and process information, I then apply that same method to a system process.

The world is shifting around this technology, and I'm glad to have such a passionate understanding and curiosity for it. I'm looking for work where that fluency is valued, and I can continue to follow my curiosity.