Hi, I'm Ash.

I'm a roboticist and cognitive scientist. I just finished my PhD at UC Santa Cruz, and these days most of my time goes to Immergo Labs, where we build VR tools that help physical therapists see how their patients move. I still work with Braingeneers, running experiments on biological neurons.

Pretty much everything I've worked on comes back to one question. How do biological components like neurons, muscles, tendons, and ligaments add up to something that can adapt and learn?

Co-founding Immergo Labs brought this into the real world. As the CTO, I've helped take the motion capture and biomechanics methods I'd been using to test robots, and use them with a VR headset to understand human motion. Joint angles, range of motion, and compensation patterns all show up live without needing an expensive biomechanics lab. I loved watching how one of our clients bragged about being able to lift again after YEARS of back pain.

During my PhD with the Braingeneers, I came at it from the other side. We showed that cortical organoids, little bits of lab-grown brain tissue, could improve at a pole-balancing task through electrical signals which gave proper feedback. That came out in Cell Reports earlier in 2026, and there's a toy version on the Play page if you want to explore a bit. Now we're running much cooler experiments to really try and understand how neural circuits learn.

Outside of work I'm usually climbing, surfing, or hiking. I have way too many plants, and lately I've been messing around with a synth.