Curriculum vitae

2021-2025 PhD at Cambridge

My PhD was supervised by Tim O'Leary at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

My thesis, Neural Sympathy: Towards Interfaces Compatible with Neural Plasticity, dealt with design challenges for brain-machine interfaces arising from their changeable operating environment — the representation of intentions and information within the brain is constantly changing as we learn new things. It describes the design of (and some surprising experiments with) a novel closed-loop optical interface in a highly plastic brain region responsible for spatial navigation, as well as more theoretical work on adaptive neural decoding.

2015-2021 Improbable

I spent the majority of my time at Improbable working on the SpatialOS Runtime, the company's core product offering at the time. This was a distributed application for managing the simulation of both large game worlds and digital twins. We developed novel network protocols, load-balancing, and tools making real-time distributed simulation tractable for game developers and infrastructure planners. Development was primarily in Java, occasionally featuring Scala, C++, and Go.

2013 Eseye Ltd.

I interned at Eseye Ltd. as an embedded software and electronics engineer. I worked on novel remote monitoring devices and efficient use of bandwidth and power consumption when they communicated over GPRS.

2012-2016 MEng at Cambridge

My undergraduate degree was in engineering. I focused largely on signal processing, statistical pattern recognition, electronics, and control theory. My Master's thesis (under the supervision of Arokia Nathan) addressed power efficiency and force detection in capacitive touch screens.

I was funded through a full scholarship awarded by the Dr. Tech. Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. In addition, Magdalene college awarded me annual scholarships (2013, 2014, 2015) and the Bundy scholarship (2016) based on examination performance, and the Christopherson Prize for Engineering (2016) based on the research component of my MEng degree. The Engineering Department awarded me the Electrical and Information Engineering Prize (2015, for the top examination results within these disciplines), the Computer-Based Project Prize (2015, for the best such project), and a jointly-awarded Dyson Bursary for my MEng research project (2016).

Teaching

Undergraduate lecturing

Since 2023, I have lectured a component of the Brain-Computer Interfaces module at the Engineering Department in Cambridge. This module is aimed at MEng-level students, and my material deals specifically with the changeable nature of the brain as an operating environment.

Undergraduate labs

I currently run a lab for 3rd-year undergraduate students studying control theory, which I wrote in 2022 (borrowing heavily from Malcolm Smith's version from 1994). This lab bridges the gap between continuous and discrete control, while also introducing ideas about modelling human agents within control systems. This is the most-attended 3rd-year lab: over a hundred students take it every year, and some of them even enjoy it!

MEng research projects

Since 2023, I have supervised three MEng research projects at the Engineering Department, with a new student currently scheduled to start in October 2025. These projects use full-body motion capture to perform virtual tasks. This system gives us high resolution data on behaviour during tasks and, as the purpose of neural activity is to eventually drive behaviour, insight into the mechanisms of learning to perform new tasks.

Postgrad Workshops

I wrote and teach a course on software engineering literacy for academics, including six lectures and practical exercises (topics include version control, build systems and portability, cross-language interop, profiling and performance optimisation, and code style).

Undergraduate supervision

I have been a supervisor — part of the system of small-group teaching at Cambridge — since 2016, and have supervised at least one course each year since then. I currently supervise 1st-year and 2nd-year engineering undergraduates on a variety of course topics (mathematics, electromagnetism), as well as a small practical module of my own devising. This is a course to encourage 1st year students, especially those without the advantages of access to workshops in their secondary education, to feel welcome in and familiar with workshop environments, and I have been responsible for awarding the Dato Foo-Sun Lao design prize annually since 2016.