Creative engineering
I'm the CTO and co-founder of Leuko, where we're developing the first noninvasive device for monitoring white blood cell levels at home, without a blood draw.
My work turns new ways of measuring the body into working medical devices, drawing on acoustics and ultrasound, optics and imaging, electronics, software, machine learning and clinical research.
I started at the UK's National Physical Laboratory, then moved to MIT, working with clinicians in Boston and Madrid to find unmet medical needs and build new ways to meet them. Leuko grew out of that work, and I'm still involved at MIT.
I also help develop the Julia programming language, and I make music.
Our device, PointCheck™, shines light into the skin near the fingernail, images blood flow in superficial capillaries, and assesses whether white blood cell levels are dangerously low. That drop, severe neutropenia, leaves people on chemotherapy open to life-threatening infection, and today it can only be caught with a blood test.
Leuko spun out of MIT and the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium, and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Madrid. It is backed by venture investors and NIH/NCI grants, and works with leading cancer centres in the US and Europe.
As CTO I lead the technology: taking a new optical measurement from the lab bench to a device used at home in clinical trials, across optics, hardware, electronics, and embedded and cloud software. I co-invented the core patented technology behind it.
At MIT I work on novel technology for sensitive, noninvasive tracking of hydration status, to help older people and their carers stay on top of hydration. Staying hydrated gets harder with age, and the consequences are severe and surprisingly common. I led the project, scientific investigation and hardware design, working with students and colleagues at MIT.
We reviewed where the field stands in the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering in 2023.
My research centers around measurement science, from ultrasound metrology to medical imaging and digital biomarkers, and has led to more than ten US patents. Selected papers:
I'm a developer on the Julia language and its package manager, and also work on precompilation and code loading, profiling and timing tools, and the REPL. I focus on what people notice day to day: packages that install and load faster, less time waiting for code to compile, clearer answers about where time is going, and a friendlier REPL.
Detecting early signs of Parkinson's disease from how people type on everyday keyboards and phones, with MIT and Madrid clinicians.
An ultrasound-based screening method for meningitis in newborns and infants.
Visualising how sound and ultrasound travel, from my time at the National Physical Laboratory.
New ways to measure and check medical and industrial ultrasound equipment at the UK's National Physical Laboratory.
Side projects, including Here comes the sun, a Google Chrome Experiment that brought the sun out on Street View.
I play and produce music, and love a good Porchfest.
