About

I started at ten in an Optimist, the little single-handed boat most kids learn in. A few years later my sister Chloe and I moved up to the 29er, a two-person skiff. We raced on Hong Kong's national team and at regattas overseas.

Sailing with my sister taught me more about patience than anything else. In a 29er you get about a second to agree on a tack, so you learn to talk less, trust more, and reset quickly after a bad one.

I ran the HKIS sailing club and taught with Sailability Hong Kong, which gets people with disabilities out on the water. For one student I 3D printed a tactile model of a Hansa dinghy so they could learn the boat by touch before taking the helm.

Sailing is also why I study aerospace. Wanting to know why a sail works led me to fluid dynamics, then to a lattice-Boltzmann sail model and an agent that learned to tack, and later to a camber-changing sail on the solar car. The wind tunnel on my home page runs the same kind of sim.

I've worked with clay since I was seven. In high school my portfolio was about the ocean: waves, coral and sea turtles, mostly things I'd seen from a boat or on a dive.

I like the parts of ceramics that feel like engineering, like how clays, glazes and oxides react in the kiln, and shaping a form is a lot like iterating on a CAD model, just with my hands. I also like the part that doesn't. You load the kiln and accept whatever comes out.