Max Maehara

When I see something that I think should exist—or something that could work better—my instinct is to understand how it works, learn whatever I am missing, and try to build it myself. That instinct is what drew me to electrical and computer engineering: it lets me move constantly between thinking and doing, from understanding a difficult problem to turning it into something real.

My work has taken me from FPGA acceleration and biomedical sensing research to wearable computing, autonomous fabrication, AI systems, and new approaches to manufacturing. The subjects change, but the reason I build does not: I want to spend my life making things I believe are useful and putting them into the world.