Research Interests

Engineering Integration of Complex Systems

Energy and Material interactions of the Built and Natural Environment

(And most recently)

Synthetic Biology

I am an Adjunct Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, a Senior Research Fellow at Engie, and one of the founders of Synthetic Applied Biology, Inc. For most of my career I was the Chief Scientist at Walt Disney Imagineering where I led much of Disney’s Research and Development group. While I was with Disney I lived for a decade in Shanghai China, as well as in Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Now I am spending most of my time as a Senior Research Fellow for Engie, formalizing the basis for Integrated Infrastructure Systems at Stanford (and teaching a class about that) and getting my startup off the ground.

I started my education in biology and biochemistry, then added chemical engineering and finally civil and environmental engineering. I always considered that my approach to engineering was closer to that of a biologist; and that gave me a different perspective than most of my engineering peers. Most of engineering is the process of finding mathematical simplifications of the real world, but accurate enough to be useful and practical. I know that beginning STEM students may not feel like we are simplifying, but the more study and experience one has the more this becomes obvious. I tend to expect the world to be complicated and context dependent, so I am always looking for the connections between the phenomena I study. These connections form the basis of scientific context and are under emphasized in most STEM educational settings. I think that’s a loss and I try in my classes to bring that back as both part of “design thinking” and as part of a more formalized structure of analysis.

I have been living about half time in the south of France where I learned of, experienced and became fascinated by the cave art of the Upper Paleolithic period. Southern France and Northern Spain are two of the few remaining areas in the world where the evidence is pretty clear about how (and when) Homo sapiens differentiated from the other hominins of the period. The more I saw and the more I learned became persuaded that this Upper Paleolithic period was THE critical moment of the evolution of modern man and, in fact, THE moment (if 5000 thousand years can be considered a “moment”) that differentiated Homo sapiens from Homo neanderthalensis. This would be no more than an academic fascination except that I think this evolutionary moment is rooted in neurobiology - and that fact has enormous implications for education and in particular STEM education.