My name is Sebastian.
I explore the world by making things.
Work experience
I currently work at the Open Agriculture Initiative in the MIT Media Lab.
February 2018 – Present, Open Agriculture Initiative, MIT Media Lab
Sebastian is currently working at the Open Ag Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He designs and builds mechanical and electrical systems to sustain plant life in controlled environments.
September 2016 – August 2017, CSL, NASA Ames
Sebastian continued his project from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (see below) at NASA’s Ames campus near Mountain View, CA. He worked with Kenny Cheung in the Coded Structures Laboratory.
June 2013 – August 2016, Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT
Over three summers, Sebastian worked at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, where he designed and prototyped mechanisms aiming to assist robotic swarm assembly of arbitrarily large, lightweight lattice structures. His projects there included an 8 legged robot that can walk on the lattice surfaces, a robot capable of screwing itself through the lattice structure, a parts magazine for a robot that builds the structure, as well as a fixed wing drone.
Summer 2011, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT
Sebastian has also worked as an intern at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT, where he designed and field-tested a home automation system for Multiple Sclerosis patients.
NASA Coded Structures Lab
Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley
We made this wing entirely of voxels. For its weight, it’s an order of magnitude stronger than foam of the same material. It’s also completely reconfigurable; we could have taken it apart and constructed something different.
Center for Bits and Atoms
3 Summer Internships
Seen here: An 8 legged spider robot for walking along lattice structures (Green and White), and a robot that screws itself through a structure (Blue).
Astrophotography
A photo of our moon taken through an 800mm apochromatic refractor, mounted on an equatorial tripod. If you look closely at some of the craters, you can see fissures from the impact stretching across the face of the moon. These impacts were so powerful that they cracked the surface of the moon.
Jupiter and its four biggest moons.
In order to capture the cloud bands on Jupiter as well as its much darker moons, I had to take two exposures and overlay them. Although Jupiter has many moons, my telescope is only powerful enough to detect the four biggest ones. They are called the Galilean moons, named after their discoverer. Interestingly, Galileo’s telescope was far inferior to my entry level telescope.
I have also been trying to take photos of neighboring galaxies. Our sister galaxy, Andromeda, has an apparent size about 6 times that of the moon, so it takes up a significant amount of sky. Unfortunately it is very dim, which is why you can only see its bright core with the naked eye (looks like a blurry star). The trick to photographing it is keeping your telescope pointing in the same direction for a few hours, to maximize exposure. Obviously, the earth rotates in that time, so I have a motorized tripod that rotates the opposite way. So far I have only gotten blurry smudges, I think I have to step up my post processing game. Andromeda is visible from earth’s northern hemisphere during the winter, so I hope to get a good picture soon.
Art
High School Sculpture Project
I took a class in high school in which each student was given a large piece of plywood and told to make a sculpture. I cut out a whole bunch of nested trapezoids and stacked them into an 8 foot tower, with a gentle rotation. I’m more of an engineer than an artist, but I enjoy the creative process.
Robot
(I like robots)
I made this cute robot as a christmas gift for my mom. A few months later, on her birthday, the robot sang happy birthday, much to my mom’s surprise. Its main components are an arduino pro mini and an ultrasonic distance measuring sensor. The total cost was less than five dollars, but those are all parts I have lying around the house.
Left: A photo of a weld I made as part of the bridge building team at Lehigh. I love welding, even though it is loud and bright, I find it relaxing to focus on the job.
Right: A tiny house I built as my senior project in high school. This is about as far as I got before the neighbors realized I didn’t have a building permit.