Born in the USA and raised in New Zealand, I grew up pulling my toys apart instead of playing with them, quickly progressing to bicycles, motorcycles and automobiles. I had a fascination for beautiful things that go fast from a young age and a yearning to understand how these machines worked.
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At age 17 I joined world-renowned explorer Mike Horn on an expedition to the Amazon Rainforest. Exploring this wild environment and developing projects to slow it's destruction ignited a passion for the planet and the outdoors. It created a desire to engineer products that will accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy & mobility and to assist the people most affected by climate change.
An honors degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury was a natural progression.
While completing my Bachelors of Mechanical Engineering, I interned at Oracle Team USA and helped design and build the high-performance carbon-fibre composite AC72, the winner of the hotly contested 34th America's Cup Yacht Race. After graduating, I pursued my passion for sustainability at BECA in Australia, gaining excellent inter-disciplinary mechanical engineering design experience on water, wastewater and biogas projects.
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I returned to the USA in 2019 to pursue my passion for sustainable mobility, joining BYTON to develop an all-new all-electric level 3 autonomous SUV, the M-BYTE. This was an incredible learning experience that helped me to develop a deep and broad understanding of electric vehicles, leading detailed cross functional design integration across all vehicle systems, working closely with colleagues in China, Germany and the United States. With the arrival of the 2020 COVID epidemic and a challenging business environment, I left BYTON with a full year of start up EV experience under my belt.
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Despite a promising product, the company was struggling through leadership and geopolitical challenges. I took a short learning break, pursuing courses at Art Center College of Design extension school and entering the Founder Institute start-up accelerator program spun out of Stanford University. These enabled me to explore my passions for product and transportation design and get real practical experience developing a new service, iterating, experimenting and focussing on the customer in a startup incubator environment. This was my first taste of product management and running a startup. I put these on hold temporarily to join a different promising EV startup, Lucid Motors, in mid 2020.
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For the past five years I have pursued my dream job at Lucid Motors. Since joining, the company has entered production of the much-acclaimed Lucid Air sedan and subsequent model derivates, including the Lucid Air Sapphire, the world's most powerful and fastest accelerating sedan. It has brought online two new greenfield manufacturing facilities, completed an IPO on the NASDAQ, launched the Lucid Gravity SUV, signed a powertrain supply deal with Aston Martin and made significant progress towards launching an all new EV powertrain and midsize platform. All of these milestones will enable it to offer a truly compelling and attainable mass market EV and have a meaningful impact on the progress of sustainable and exciting mobility solutions. It has been a privilege to contribute to the growth of the company that has lead the industry in it's pursuit of creating the most efficient and engaging vehicles on the planet.
My role evolved significantly over my five year tenure. I was fortunate to develop deep technical knowledge of vehicle architectures in my early years, becoming a cross functional vehicle integration expert, as we successfully launched new vehicles. For the latter two years, I was responsible for creating the foundation of the new midsize platform vehicle products as the first engineer to work on the project. As the advanced engineering lead for the program, I collaborated closely with the product marketing and design studio teams to help turn initial ideas and sketches into product concepts and then feasible engineering designs for deep analysis and optimization with technical engineering experts. I regularly presented product and feature concepts and business case analyses to executives and developed new tools to evaluate product attributes to aid strategic decision making. Additionally, I evaluated new product innovations and emerging automotive technologies for integration into Lucid vehicles and as stand-alone IP.
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In 2024 I completed introductory courses through Stanford Continuing Studies department in AI & VC development to expand my knowledge of these fast developing fields and to learn new tools to aid me in product development.
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When I'm not working on developing products, I love spending time in nature and sharing my passion for skiing and sailing as a qualified instructor. I love travelling, reading, playing music, taking photographs and exploring new places. I find great inspiration in these environments.
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What's next? For the next six months I am focussed on learning about the customer to grow my knowledge in the product development and product management field. I am approaching this in the most practical way I can to tighten the feedback loop and rapidly develop and test product ideas. My current projects include consulting, stock photography, e-commerce, CAD design, 3D printing, writing, music, sculpture and blogging alongside travelling and learning new languages. These are outlined here.
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I am an enthusiastic innovator, excellent communicator and enjoy problem solving in collaborative team environments. I'm confident, creative, curious and committed to continual learning and improvement.
I'm deeply passionate about electric and autonomous vehicles and the future of transportation and technology.
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I have a philosophy that innovation can come from any level. I have the ability to build a strong rapport with people of all backgrounds to enable high inter-disciplinary design collaboration. I seek to challenge, and be challenged, to achieve the best outcome for the product user.
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If you're interested in collaborating on any of these projects that sound interesting or think I could be of assistance for some projects of your own, please don't hesitate to reach out.