Control systems engineer for precision semiconductor equipment.

I'm a mechanical controls engineer, five years into semiconductor equipment. Four of them at ASML on the reticle stage of EUV lithography systems; now at Applied Materials on controls for inspection tools.

NowMechanical Controls Engineer,
Applied Materials

2021–25ASML — Reticle Stage,
EUV lithography

EducationMS Controls & Mechatronics,
University of Michigan

Working withPrecision-motion reticle and wafer stages — linear actuators, encoders, control systems

Experience

In detail

2025 — Present Santa Clara, California

Applied Materials

Mechanical Controls Engineer

Control systems for semiconductor inspection tooling — the machines that check what lithography just produced.

Control design and commissioning for precision motion in inspection systems.
Modelling, loop design and tuning against real hardware, with the measurement chain treated as part of the control problem rather than a given.
Working across the mechanical, electrical and software boundaries a mechatronic system sits on.

2021 — 2025 Wilton, Connecticut

ASML

Senior Mechatronics Engineer — Reticle Stage, Design & Engineering

Four years on the reticle stage of EUV lithography systems: maintaining and improving the control architecture of the motion stage, and qualifying design changes on test rigs before they reached the field.

Ran lithography test rigs to test and qualify design changes against real hardware before release.
Developed and standardised test strategies for motion control systems in MATLAB, Simulink and Python, and established DFMEA practice across teams.
Led field escalations and troubleshooting on production systems, and built data-driven diagnostics that caught failures before they became downtime.
Acted as team lead — mentoring engineers and owning technical execution across concurrent projects.

Academic projects

All 6

Graduate and undergraduate work — the rigs and models the professional work is built on.

Inverted pendulum

Michigan, 2019–21

Swing-up and stabilisation of a multi-degree-of-freedom inverted pendulum on hardware I built the driver for: bring the rod up from hanging, then hold it upright against whatever you do to it.

Domain · Mechatronics, controls Method · Multi-DOF modelling, LQR, swing-up Built on · NI myRIO, MATLAB / Simulink

Magnetic levitation

Michigan, 2019–21

Holding a small iron ball suspended in mid-air in an electromagnetic field — a plant with no stable resting point in either direction.

Domain · Mechatronics, controls Method · Analytic modelling, parameter ID, lead compensation Built on · NI myRIO, MATLAB / Simulink

Adaptive cruise control

Michigan, 2019–21

A low-level adaptive cruise controller with automatic steering and haptic feedback, running on an NXP S32K with sensor and actuator traffic carried over CAN.

Domain · Embedded systems, motor control Method · Bicycle model, position and velocity control Built on · NXP S32K144, embedded C, CAN

Also

Outside work I run — a few marathons and a stack of New York road races, logged on the running page — and occasionally write something long, which lives under writing. I also build the odd small tool when one is missing.