I'm a research fellow in the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I completed my PhD in Aerospace Engineering at Stanford, funded by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. My current research is focused on decision-making in safety-critical, climate, and space systems, where operational decisions must be made made quickly and correctly in complex environments while still being explainable and understandable by human stakeholders. I love space exploration and solving hard problems with good people.

I'm currently the Executive Director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety, and a post-doctoral researcher with appointments in Mineral-X and the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL). I also consult with companies, particularly space start-ups, on technical leadership, software engineering, engineering operations, and technical analysis. I'm open to new opportunities.

Prior to this, I started and led the Spacecraft Operations Group at Capella Space, the first US commercial synthetic aperture radar Earth imaging constellation. There I developed the first fully-automated mission operations software, realizing lights-out tasking-to-delivery of radar satellite data for a commercial constellation. I subsequently started and led the Constellation Operations and Space Safety Groups at Project Kuiper. Most recently, I was a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services, where I worked on building software services for large-scale distributed edge compute applications.

If you're looking to get in touch for work topics can reach me at [first name].[last name]@stanford.edu. For other inquiries, please reach out to [first name]@argoinnovations.com.

Selected Talks

Agents of Tech: Can we Trust AI

In this episode of Agents of Tech, Stephen Horn and Autria Godfrey explore the rapidly evolving world of Artificial Intelligence and ask the pressing questions: Can we trust AI? Is it safe?

Hundred Year Podcast: Improving AI Safety

In this episode, I spoke with Adario Strange to explain why the commercialization of space will continue to fuel our explorations into the Moon and Mars, and how AI-powered robots may be the primary method for deep space exploration in the future.

Thesis Defense: Task Planning for Earth Observing Satellite Systems

This is the video of my PhD thesis defense at Stanford University. I discuss the task planning for Earth observing satellite systems, past approaches, the use of Markov decision processes, and the development of a new algorithm based on the maximum independent set problem.