Physicist and aerospace engineer, writing software for quantum computer fabrication in Santa Barbara. Plotted here as a trajectory, from the Santa Barbara coast, past the Moon, to a comet.
I grew up in Los Angeles, spent a year in Haifa, and studied physics at UC Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies, with a focus on computational fluid dynamics and combustion. A master's in aerospace engineering at Stanford followed, in controls and space propulsion.
Since then: Oslo, Seattle, Geneva, Mountain View, and back to Santa Barbara in 2023. Outside work I paraglide, photograph the sky through a 10-inch refractor, and play guitar and piano.
Publications · with Google Quantum AI and collaborators
Six papers in Nature, one in Nature Physics, one in Science.
Preprints
Research
Education
The longest stretch of the flight, and the home for essays. The first ones are being written; each will appear here as a waypoint on the coast to the Moon.
Zero-gee humanoids
Low Earth orbit · MuJoCo · Unitree G1
A Unitree G1 humanoid, all 29 joints, simulated in MuJoCo inside a 5 × 3 × 3 m station module. It turns itself over the way a falling cat does, with zero net angular momentum (twist, somersault, cartwheel), then pushes off, glides and catches a handrail across the module.
Lunar Cities Atlas
NASA LOLA · Kaguya · Diviner · Leaflet · three.js
Where should the first cities, roads and relays on the Moon go? Sunlight, permanent shadow and Earth visibility at both poles are ray-traced from LOLA laser altimetry. Least-cost highways connect ten sites, from a capital on the rim of de Gerlache to the Marius Hills skylight, with roads out to the ice in Shackleton, Haworth and Cabeus. A relay-constellation designer and design notes cover the rest: radiation, the 354-hour night, dust, and what a road crest does to a rover at one-sixth g.
Open the atlas ↗
Lunar Lava Tubes
LRO Narrow Angle Camera · Kaguya · interactive 3D
Caves under the Moon's lava plains. Real orbital photos of skylight pits and rilles, pinned to their places on a lunar map: eight sites from the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, where LRO radar found a passage leading off the floor in 2024, to Marius Hills and Ingenii. Then a 3D model of a tube beneath a collapsed roof, where you move the Sun and watch the patch of light cross the floor.
Explore the tubes ↗
Lunar MRE
Molten regolith electrolysis · NIST-JANAF
Oxygen from moon dirt. A 0-D equilibrium model of molten regolith electrolysis: sweep the cell potential across high-titanium mare, low-titanium mare and highland soil, and track how much oxygen comes out, what metal alloy is left, and the energy per kilogram.
Asteroid Atlas
1,635 asteroids · DAMIT · JPL SBDB · three.js
Every asteroid with a 3D shape model, plus five comets and the dwarf planets, on one interactive map. Pick a body to see its tumbling shape, orbit and spectral type, and the cheapest launch windows from 2027 to 2050, found by a Lambert porkchop search. Eros comes out at 6.00 km/s from low Earth orbit, against Benner's published 5.96.
Open the atlas ↗
Mathilde
Asteroid gravimetry · EKF · JAX · NUTS
Mapping what is inside an asteroid from orbit, the way GRACE and GRAIL mapped the Earth and Moon: satellites track each other, and the tiny changes in their ranges reveal where the mass is. Mascon gravity, a filter that estimates satellite states and clocks together, and Bayesian inversion of the interior densities. Its site keeps a technical logbook.
Visit Mathilde ↗Workshop
Images: Earth from NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble; Moon from NASA LRO maps. Santa Barbara terrain from AWS Terrain Tiles (USGS 3DEP, SRTM), with the coastline traced from Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0.