I was born a week after my mother's thesis defense.

My family emigrated from Andalucía, in southern Spain, in 1990 — my parents and my three older siblings, a brother and two sisters. They settled first in Madison, Wisconsin, where my mother and father both earned PhDs in microbiology, somehow raising four children while they did it. I arrived a week after my mother defended her thesis.

We moved to Denver for their postdocs and stayed when my father took a faculty position at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. All of that happened before I could form memories; mine begin a little later, once he had a lab of his own.

Our home ran in castellano — Spanish was my first language, and I didn't really learn English until kindergarten. That part of us never faded. We still keep a Spanish table — tortilla de patatas, croquetas, boquerones, squid, paella, pisto — we watch fútbol, and we sing villancicos every Christmas.

Most of my childhood summers were spent in Granada with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and I still get back to Spain as often as I can to keep those ties close.

Granada — with my uncle and cousin, the Alhambra behind usBack in Spain with my father, brother, and nephew

That lab is where a good part of my childhood happened. I ran small experiments of my own — culturing bacteria, making slides — and spent hours watching my parents write papers, sitting in on my father's medical-school lectures, tagging along to the weekly lab meeting. Science was never a subject I discovered; it was simply the family trade, and the lab was a second home.

Outside of it, I played soccer — my father coached the team, the Raptors — and most of our time together as a family was spent outdoors. We backpacked, fished, and watched birds, noticing which wild berries and grains they fed on and pulling apart owl pellets to reconstruct what the owls had eaten. That habit of looking closely at small living things never left me. It's where my love of aquariums comes from: I keep planted freshwater tanks, aquascaping in the tradition of the late Takashi Amano.

A creek crossing in the Colorado high country

When I was in high school my parents went after a lifelong dream: a homestead in the mountains. They found a plot in the Sangre de Cristo range, in one of the most remote corners of Colorado — empty land, nothing on it but a windmill to pump water. We parked a trailer there to live in while we visited, planted a thousand young trees, and put in beehives. The bears have broken into those a few times and taken all the honey.

Then my father, my brother, and I started on a house. We poured the foundation and built a fifteen-foot retaining wall, had the local Amish frame it, and put in an 8 kW solar array — there is no grid out there, no power, no water, no internet. Everything inside was ours, down to the cabinets and the tile. We were among the first in Colorado to get Starlink, after three years on the waitlist; before that, making a call meant driving fifteen minutes up the dirt road to the top of a hill. The house took ten years.

Then came the animals — a barn and a corral roofed over against bears and mountain lions, tens of thousands of linear feet of fence, a greenhouse to grow our own food. The first ewes and rams arrived three years ago, and the flock has grown with every lambing season since; we do all the veterinary work ourselves, from lambing to shearing. Fifteen years of it, seven days a week, alongside my parents' careers and my own — high school, college, grad school, then Rooted Robotics. Somehow none of it ever came at the expense of the other.

The ranch houseThe barn yardShearing dayFernando Rey, the ramA ewe with her lambsThe flockChecking fence line on the ATV

Time with my mother was art, music, and literature. I played piano for ten years, until a robotics accident in high school severed the tendons in my right hand; regaining full movement took two years, and by then I was too deep in physics to go back to practicing. The affection stayed — I'm still pulled toward the Impressionists, toward Ravel and Debussy and Chopin, toward Monet and Picasso and Rodin — and I still oil paint.

She also handed me the books that shaped how I think: Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Joyce, and later the philosophers — Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant. I've always been drawn to work that's cerebrally vivid, that asks you to sit with it.

From eight to sixteen I fenced épée, seriously. I won a national title in my age group, took several North American Cups, and represented the United States at the Junior Olympics. Then my competitors hit their growth spurts and I didn't — and in épée, where the blade is a fixed length, a long reach is a permanent advantage. My edge quietly slipped away.

It happened to coincide with my falling for engineering, math, and physics, so I took an honest look at the two roads and chose the one that seemed more interesting for the long haul.

Much of that pull came from how much I loved to build. My high-school experimental-physics class was really a run of engineering projects — circuits, roller coasters, catapults — teaching electricity and elastic forces by making things. In parallel I was reading special relativity on my own, and the notion that space and time themselves are elastic struck me as one of the most beautiful ideas I'd ever met.

For a while, though, it was going to be philosophy. What I wanted was to rationalize the world around me, and the two looked like different angles on the same problem. I chose physics because its answers are concrete — even if it largely sets aside the question of why in order to answer how — and because it made room for the engineering I already loved. Between the joy of building and the quiet of fundamental things, physics won. I went to CU Boulder to study it.

I enrolled in physics and applied math. My family pushed me to find research early, so I asked around the department until I met Jamie Nagle. A lot of professors treat undergraduates as free labor and hand them the dullest work in the lab. Jamie treated me like a scientist — he gave me real detector work on a nuclear-physics experiment at Brookhaven, and I built my first automated instrument there, a scanner that became the quality-control gate for a calorimeter. In my last semester he let me take on an analysis project of my own, which turned into the most useful thing I have built: an algorithm still running in more than twenty published papers. I owe him a great deal for that, and for the years of mentorship around it.

The detector work, the test stand, and the algorithm are on thenuclear physics page.

I was admitted to Columbia for high-energy physics and then changed my mind. Quantum mechanics had been winning me over, and when I looked at what graduate work in high-energy nuclear physics involved day to day, it was mostly writing code. I wanted the experimentalist's version — hardware, and a different problem every day. Tanya Zelevinsky gave me a shot in her lab, cooling molecules with light. Almost nothing from undergrad transferred and the first year was a steep climb, which I happen to live for.

Then the group emptied out — our postdoc left for finance, the senior student graduated — and the pandemic arrived. New York in those first months is hard to describe: hospital tents in Central Park, military hospital ships in the Hudson, tens of thousands dead, most of them elderly. It felt like being inside an apocalypse film. I decided I was going to finish anyway, and rebuilt the entire experiment alone. Six months later I had my result. I wrote the thesis back in Denver, in two months.

The Zelevinsky group outside Pupin, Columbia's physics building

What the experiment was and why molecules are so hard to cool is on theAMO physics page.

Coming out of the PhD I wanted problems with more immediate utility, and applied for aerospace, quantum-computing, and photonics roles. While those interviews ground on, I started helping a friend with a robotics project — automation for indoor agriculture — wrote a USDA SBIR grant to attack the labor problem in the industry, and won it. I used it to raise private capital, and that became Rooted Robotics. By the time the aerospace and quantum offers came through we had $750K in the bank and too much momentum to walk away, so I turned them down to find out how far I could take it.

We built a machine that worked and that nobody wanted to buy, listened to what growers actually needed, and rebuilt the product line around the answer. Four years in we are at $1.1M in annual revenue, CE certified, with machines running on three continents and an acquisition under negotiation.

The machines, the pivot, and how it all works are on theRooted Robotics page. What comes next is still open.