About Me

Hi, I’m a Chemical Engineering graduate from the University of South Florida, originally from Concepción, Chile. I moved to Florida when I was nearly 6 years old and have lived here since.

Engineering runs in my family. My dad is a process engineer and my grandfather was a chief operator at a petroleum refinery in Chile, so I’ve been exposed to what process engineering is really like from a young age and have been personally invested in it for a long time. Throughout my education, internships, and research experience I’ve built up a well-rounded background incorporating process modeling, design, and analysis including Aspen Plus and CHEMCAD simulations, hydraulic and control systems, P&IDs, hazard analyses, and leading a multidisciplinary capstone project from concept to economic evaluation.

An elective course on synthetic fuel production sparked an interest in how different process technologies can integrate to improve efficiency and sustainability. Renewable energy has a fundamental tension at its core: most of its value in addressing environmental, climate, and economic sustainability isn’t quantifiable in a conventional sense, which conflicts with a world where short-term profit drives investment. Process engineers are tasked with bridging that gap by providing pragmatic solutions that simultaneously deliver quantifiable and non-quantifiable value. That challenge is what drew me to choose sustainable biodiesel production from waste cooking oil as my senior design project topic and eventually led me to continue contributing to related research after the project concluded.

Engineering isn’t something I leave at work. On the software side, that includes developing a Discord bot to manage a custom ranking system among friends and building a declarative Linux configuration using NixOS. On the hardware side, I’ve worked on a mini-vehicle controlled by voice commands interpreted using local AI models and helped my dad manage the water treatment system for our house. I’m also a strong advocate for free and open source software, right to repair, and data privacy as well as the idea that buying something should mean owning it.

Outside of technical problems, I enjoy traveling, the outdoors, and riding my bike. Whenever I’m not working on something, you might catch me trying to beat my Minesweeper time or doing chess puzzles.