Andrés
Rogelio
Marjus
Velarde
Portfolio 2025
A Note From Andrés
Stories are peculiar things. They never quite capture the essence of an experience, which is ineffable by default. However, this itself is not a shortcoming of storytelling. Rather, it’s a fascinating feature of stories. Each time a story is shared, it takes on new life. From the mouth of the teller, to the eyes & ears of the listener, meaning is transformed & multiplied infinite-fold. And in retelling over & again, a story evolves. Whether I like it or not, that’s how it goes. To tell a story is to let go of the string which holds the arrow in tension.
So before we begin, a few disclaimers:
(1) Anything underlined is a link. Click to learn more.
(2) It is up to you to make of these stories what you will. I do not purport that they have any inherent meaning besides that which you may choose to assign. So choose wisely, for what you seek is seeking you.
Dear reader, I hope you will revisit this portfolio & appreciate different perspectives or insights each time. For by the time you finish reading this sentence, you & I will have died & been reborn. Welcome to the first moment of the rest of your life. I’m glad you’re here.
In this portfolio, you will find the emergent outcomes of my personal striving. Over the years, I have chosen again and again to operate at the intersection of what I believe is interesting & challenging work. Above all else, I hold one belief with utmost conviction: I am here to help. Whether that’s one person, or many, my career has centered around a desire to help other humans live more joyful & prosperous lives. Humans are the most important & interesting thing I get to experience in life. Within each of us are galaxies & galaxies worth of inner complexity & mystery. Therefore, humanity constitutes my deepest curiosity. In this portfolio, I hope that you will see how that curiosity has influenced my life, career and decision making.
I dedicate this portfolio to all those who took a personal stake in my learning and growth, not just as a professional, but as a human. I am forever grateful to Anjeli Doty, my wife, who is peerless in challenging me to dream BIG & work hard. To all my students, mentors, friends, & family: thank you for believing in me & giving me the grace to try new things & make mistakes. And finally, to Kobe, a dog whom I love, who has taught me the meaning of presence & patience. Woof.
With all my love,
Table of Contents
TKS: Coaching the World’s Most Ambitious Teens..................................................................
MIT: Designing an Engineering Design Course @ MITES......................................................
Form Energy: Accelerating Materials Testing for Renewable Energy Storage..................
UbiQD: Deploying Quantum Dot Solar Windows @ NREL & WWU......................................
UbiGro: Scaling Quantum Dot Greenhouse AgTech................................................................
Neurolux: Shipping FOAK Wireless Optogenetic Research Tools........................................
Just for Fun Projects..............................................................................................................
Proof of Life: A Photo Gallery.............................................................................................
Reviews & References............................................................................................................
Epilogue.....................................................................................................................................
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Coaching the World’s Most Ambitious Teens
Follow Your Curiosity & Do Things That Matter.
The Knowledge Society (TKS) exists to equip young people with the skills, knowledge, & mindsets they need to make a positive impact in the world, while living joyfully fulfilled lives. I believe that now more than ever we need smart people working on hard, system-level problems. Not because they have to but because they get to. Moreover, I believe that anyone can have an outsized impact in the world if they can identify what really matters to them & commit intentional time, effort, & action toward their goals.
This role has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. May the education of our youth always be entrusted to those who care deeply about joy, peace, & happiness. Because of this role, & the mindset shifts it inspired, I will forever be an educator, in constant pursuit of truth.
Change Your Mindsets, Change Your Life.
How it started: Ada joined my cohort while on mental health leave from school. She was slowly being destroyed by a banking-model of education, which was worsened by a lack of educational support at home. She started the program with a very outdated tablet, a pen, paper, and of course, an insatiable curiosity. She got to work & started building projects like her life depended on it.
How it’s going: Ada is the first person in her family to pursue higher education, & the only ever to leave India in pursuit of a better life. She currently attends Minerva University in San Francisco, after turning down full-ride offers from other 4-year American universities. Ada is a Masason Foundation member & is conducting research at UCSF on bacteriophages to target antibiotic resistant bacteria.
How it started: Despite being situated in an affluent part of California, Kenneth wasn’t dealt an easy hand. As the oldest son of a single mother who worked full time, he grew up fast by having to care for his younger brother. At the same time, he witnessed his grandfather suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, & had a burning desire to understand why & what he could do about it.
How it’s going: Kenneth is the Founder of Nyuroflow, a company uses BCI tech to support brain health by optimizing our glymphatic system. He’s advised by myself & researchers at Berkeley, Rice, Stanford, UCSF & NYU; with funding from Emergent Ventures, 1517, & Merge Club. This year Kenneth will be attending the University of California, Berkeley, in an interdisciplinary program for electrical engineering, computer science, & business. They only accept 50 students a year and have an acceptance rate below 2%.
Delhi, India
San Ramon, US
Click Here to See More!
Global Program Director (Boston & Seattle, 2022-2025)
I coached >400 Gen-Z & Gen-α students from >70 countries around the world through a virtual 10-month tech accelerator program called Innovate. Each week, I prepared & delivered immersive, project-based training sessions (2-3 hours) designed to help students learn about intersections between various fields of emergent technologies, like AI/ML, synthetic biology, quantum computing, renewable energy, nanotech, neurotech & beyond. Sessions indexed on giving students opportunities to work together on research sprints or mini-project builds, both of which were always based on peer-reviewed scientific literature & open-source guides/tools. Sessions also centered around students practicing their public speaking & technical presentation skills via live project demos, pitches, Socratic discussion, debate, casing, & principled negotiation. Most importantly, I taught students mindsets like courage, curiosity, done>perfect, antifragility, & bias for action.
Outside of sessions, I worked closely with each student help them identify a tech/science domain of interest & coached them to build projects to gain deeper technical skills & knowledge. I pushed my students to share their work online & seek out relevant industry mentors for direction & feedback on their work. Each year, students would take a break from building their personal portfolio to endeavor in various group projects aimed at solving real-world problems for real-world orgs. In these 4-week-long consulting challenges, I advised students as they crafted thoughtful, well-researched recommendations for business leaders at places like Google, Meta, World Economic Forum, Tik Tok, Samsung, IKEA, Walmart, Microsoft, & more. For their capstone, students designed Moonshot startups to solve global-scale problems using emerging tech in a radical way. I coached their companies on team dynamics & organization, technical research, stakeholder interviews, product mock-ups/demos, company websites, video production, one-pagers, & live pitches to experts and investors.
It takes a village to raise the next generation of world builders. As a Director, I have loved collaborating with my network to create memorable experiences for students. I’ve organized & hosted countless fireside chats, AMAs, and panel discussion with builders from places like NASA, MIT, Harvard, Instagram, Peloton, Google Quantum AI, Chainlink, X the Moonshot Factory, UChicago, the NSF & more. I’ve also coached my students IRL at conferences like SXSW.
Designing an Engineering Design Course @ MITES
Anyone Can Be An Engineer. Effort>Talent.
MITES Saturdays is a weekend program in Kendall Square that local students apply into. If accepted, they begin their journey in 8th grade & each year they take coursework in different science & tech domains. These courses are taught by part-time industry professionals from Google, Harvard, Boston Public Schools & elsewhere. To this day, MITES class offerings still include an Engineering Design Senior Capstone project that I was the first to design & instruct.
MITES is built to serve students who are traditionally underestimated, overlooked, & marginalized in STEM education. In Boston there are many of these kids. They’re often the children of immigrants, the first from their families to grow up in the States, & the first to pursue higher education. I am one of them. This role was pivotal in shifting my mindset from an engineer to an educator. This experience greatly influenced my decision to be a Director at TKS.
First-Gen Students Lead the Way.
My favorite thing about MITES is definitely my classmates & the instructors. Each semester we have a different subject that we focus on. They’re really all intertwined. Engineering, which is very big in Boston, was something I had no experience with at all. And I thought I wouldn’t be good on this creative end of science & math. I was really surprised to find that I enjoy it a lot! I would’ve been so lost & so much more stressed out when applying to colleges & figuring out what I wanted to do next if i didn't have the help of the MITES family.
Harvard Class of 2026. Computer Science & Art, Film, & Visual Studies
Harvard
Yale
Click Here to See More!
Lead Instructor & Curriculum Designer (Boston, 2021-2022)
I created & delivered a year-long Engineering Design curriculum for high school seniors in the MITES Saturdays Program - formerly, SEED Academy of the MIT Office of Engineering Outreach Programs. I designed weekly lesson plans, in-class activities, and take-home assignments for about 20 students. We used Google Drive, Google Classroom, & Slack for async, admin & facilitation. My curriculum was inspired & informed by Stanford’s Design School’s Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, as well as by the folks from the Harvard Negotiation Project, like Bill Ury and Roger Fischer. I also took principles of public narrative from the Kennedy School’s Marshall Ganz.
Across both fall & spring semesters, I worked with my class to identify real problems in our communities of Boston, Cambridge, & Lawrence. We then applied principles of engineering & design in an effort to address them. Our intention was to bring these solutions to life with product demos, prototypes, & digital mock-ups. The course culminated in a live symposium at MIT’s Stata Center, where students got up on stage to present their designs to all grades of MITES students, instructors, support staff, friends, & families. Projects included: a board game designed to help teachers discuss systemic racism & critical race theory with students; spatial & cost modeling for the construction of immersive greenhouse study spaces inside schools; and, of course, miniature prototypes of magnetic levitation MBTA trains (this team went for it lol).
My objective as an instructor was to equip students with human-centered decision making frameworks for addressing challenges they observe in the world around them. We had lessons on identifying stakeholders, prototyping & feedback, root cause analysis, storytelling, negotiation, scrum, public narrative, branding, marketing, reflective practice, & more. In our second semester we also spent a lot of time discussing grit, resilience, compassion, & curiosity among other mindsets. I was supported by graduate & undergraduate student TAs from MIT & Tufts University. I also had an Associate Instructor, Prerna Submaranian, who supported me with the other half of my curriculum, which was aimed at student college readiness. Mixed in with the Engineering Design lessons were activity & discussion sessions on writing admissions essays, applying for financial aid & scholarships, asking for letters of recommendation, & preparing for the transition to university & adulthood.
The MITES community has been a staple throughout my high school career & has offered me so much support. MITES has fostered an affinity for teamwork & passion for STEM. Because of the exposure to different subjects in the program, I learned more about my passion for the environment & engineering. This, along with my MITES instructor, allowed me to create a strong college application focused on environmental engineering—and I am happy to say I was accepted!
Yale Class of 2026. Bioengineering & Biomedical Engineering
Accelerating Materials Testing for Renewable Energy Storage
Sr. Materials Engineer (Boston, 2021-2022)
I built an internal value stream for the characterization of iron-air battery (a very cool redox battery) materials across multiple R&D areas. I designed & deployed standard operating procedures (SOPs) & automated materials testing processes to characterize hundreds of solid-phase & liquid-phase materials every day, saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars of would-be contracted materials testing costs. In this process, I became proficient in the theory & practice of characterization techniques like x-ray diffractometry, scanning electron microscopy, BET surface area analysis, pycnometry, & ICP-MS/ICP-OES.
I led a team of engineers & lab technicians, & invented Characterization as a Service to support the research of dozens of chemists, chemical engineers, & battery test engineers & scientists. I coined my system CAAS, & it was built from the principles of Kaizen & Lean 6 Sigma. Practically, CAAS worked via a physical ticketing system for intaking materials samples to a digital queue in Asana that was managed & executed by my highly-trained technicians. Materials were characterized on a First-In-First-Out basis in 48 hours or less without sacrificing data quality or compromising the fidelity of the materials as a result of improper handling or storage.
I also rebuilt our materials & chemistry labs to optimize for measurement throughput. I conducted a visual analysis on workflow & used recorded time trials among technicians to learn where bottlenecks existed on the lab floor. I then trained my technicians & engineers in new, streamlined SOPs that reduced sample measurement times significantly by better organizing tools, workstations, & body movements in the lab. I also collaborated with Form’s Lab Operations team to implement improved safety practices around materials handling, storage & waste disposal. My work directly afforded my team the ability to build & test Form Energy’s first, full-scale iron-air battery assembly in Berkeley, California.
Low-Cost Renewable Energy on Demand.
Form Energy spun out of Greentown Labs as a collaboration between battery experts at MIT, Tesla, & beyond. The company exists to design grid-scale batteries that can store wind & solar energy for long duration (>100 hours) at low costs (>$20/kWh). In effect, Form aims to accelerate the deployment of renewables by affording governments & energy companies the ability to store intermittent sources of energy for future, on-demand use.
In under a year, I helped Form scale from 30 employees to over 300. It was a privilege to work alongside the world’s most wicked-smart & most mission-driven builders. In 2024 Form opened Form Factory 1 in Weirton, West Virginia - their first full-scale battery production facility that advances us toward a future of cheap, abundant renewable energy. To this day, I hold Form’s team values in my heart: Humanity, Creativity, Excellence.
Deploying Quantum Dot Solar Windows @ NREL & WWU
Sr. Engineer & Project Manager (Los Alamos, 2017-2021)
I led the development & design of UbiQD’s (pronounced ubiquity) first, large-scale (>1 sq.m) solar windows that were deployed in pilot tests at the National Renewable Energy Lab, Western Washington University, & the Los Alamos Holiday Inn. I developed resin injection & casting methods for the fabrication of outsized luminescent solar concentrators (LSC). This included management of ancillary work streams for the chemical, optical, mechanical, & electrical characterization of these materials. I became proficient in UV-Vis spectroscopy, spectrofluorometry, haze detection, & other measurement techniques. Early in product development, I designed full-factorial experiments to discover improved nanocomposite formulations. This led through breakthroughs in window color, adhesion, quantum dot stability, & power conversion efficiency.
I authored multiple peer-reviewed publications in journals of the American Chemical Society. I also authored grant proposals which earned my team over a million dollars in R&D funding from the National Science Foundation’s SBIR Program.
As a final part of this project, I collaborated with Harry Atwater & researchers at Caltech on the Space Solar Power Project. I managed a team of engineers & scientists at UbiQD to create special nanocomposite formulations for optimized LSC performance in the harsh environment of low Earth orbit. I coordinated the testing of our materials with partners at LANL & NREL who ran vibration, vacuum outgassing, thermal stress, electrical performance, & optical degradation tests. We were able to surpass all performance benchmarks, readying our LSCs for a life in space. In 2023, the nanomaterials I built were the first ever to travel to space in the history of humanity.
Powering Cities of the Future.
UbiQD’s engineers & scientists shared in the celebration of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, when Moungi Bawendi, from whom our tech was licensed, took home this prestigious award.
As climate change & other factors push more people to rapidly growing city centers, solar windows, now branded as the WENDOW, offer an elegant solution to the scarcity of hyper-local, urban solar energy. This year, UbiQD raised over $20M to advance our original vision to make every city skyline in the world a solar energy harvester. I’m proud to have been the 6th employee at UbiQD, & to have laid the groundwork for continued research in this fascinating intersection of nanotechnology & climate solutions.
Quantum Dot Laminated Glass
Quantum Dot Interlayer
Low-Iron Glass
Power Perimeter
Edge-mounted Solar Cells
Frame-integrated PCB
Scaling Quantum Dot Greenhouse AgTech
Senior Engineer (Los Alamos, 2017-2021)
I co-invented UbiGro, UbiQD’s first commercial product, a greenhouse film that fine-tunes light wavelength to increase crop yield and other metrics for vegetables, ornamentals, cannabis, fruit, & more. Alongside Dr. Aaron Jackson, I designed a nanopolymer composite that could be manufactured at scale using industrial roll-to-roll coating processes. I used full factorial DOE to optimize the optical & mechanical properties of the films (e.g. haze, absorption/emission spectra, adhesion, ductility, etc.). I also developed new resin additives to create formulations with enhanced quantum dot solubility. This process also necessitated my developing tools for rapid, lab-scale film prototyping, like doctor blades for film deposition & robotic light systems for resin photocuring. I documented many trade-secret formulations & wrote SOPs for materials testing that were ASTM compliant.
To go from bench top to some of the largest greenhouses in the world, I contracted toll manufacturers in Japan & Taiwan to produce our first pilot-scale films. This meant training their technicians on my SOPs for materials handling, & navigating import/export requirements for moving flammables & nanomaterials across international boarders. This allowed us to start selling our films to generate needed revenue. I negotiated & oversaw the installation of the company’s first international pilot tests. My partners included the largest cucumber producer in North America, Dutch agricultural research institutes, and, of course, NASA. I also traveled around North America, working alongside farmers & installing films by hand at smaller grow operations.
UbiGro remains UbiQD’s best-selling product, & a key component of the company’s revenue generation model.
Boost Crop Yields & Profit With Less Energy.
Since 2021, UbiGro has evolved into full greenhouse coverings, made possible by advancements in manufacturing. Namely, by shifting from roll-to-roll manufacturing to extrusion & blown film manufacturing.
Countless case studies have corroborated my early findings that these greenhouse films boost crop yield by up to 30% without any additional energy input or cost to farmers. You can buy UbiGro for your backyard hoop house or garden, today. The tomatoes I grew with UbiGro were some of the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.
Facade
Structure
Quantum Dots
Air
Plants
Shipping First-of-a-Kind, Wireless Optogenetic Research Tools
Product Development & Design Engineer (Champaign-Urbana, 2015-2017)
I designed & launched first-of-a-kind, wireless optogenetics research tools to make plug & play neurotech research easier & faster. These tools included miniature, flexible optoelectronic devices & electrical hardware to power & control them remotely. I built power distribution control (PDC) boxes that connected to a Neurolux app that let researchers control the device micro-LED color, brightness, & flashing frequency.
I also became intimately familiar with the implant design, as I worked in the cleanrooms of UIUC’s Materials Research Labs to fabricate them using photolithography, chemical vapor deposition, sputtering, & etching. I also oversaw the implantation of early versions of our devices into >100 live mice subjects at the Beckman Institute. Over many months I cared for them & studied how our devices performed in vivo. This allowed my collaborators to iterate on implant coating materials & surgical methods for implantation at scale. In parallel, I wrote SOPs to run stress tests on our PDCs, which were subjected to temperature extremes, strong vibrations, & drops impacts. I also optimized antennae configurations for reliable power delivery via induction, even in our beta testers’ most complex built environments for animal behavioral studies.
My work culminated in the launch of our first product, putting it directly to the hands of 10 neuroscience researchers at universities around the Unites States. This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health STTR grant. Post launch, I supported our team of beta testers by helping them troubleshoot blockers with system calibration, set-up, & tool use. This involved spending quality time with our partners on the phone, email, or Slack. I also used the university’s media studio to create visual & audio content that went into the design of digital playbooks that beta users could reference asynchronously.
Animal Studies to Understand Human Cognitive Function
Neurolux exists to accelerate neurological research, bringing us closer to understanding & preventing human neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson’s & Alzheimer’s. During this time, I was lucky to work directly with Dr. John Rogers, who challenged my thinking as an engineer. He later moved Neurolux operations to Chicago while he built the Querry Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at Northwestern University. Neurolux still sells optogenetic research tools today, continuing to iterate on my initial designs.
This experience was my entry point into the fast-paced, interdisciplinary world of hard tech development. After this, I thought myself an entrepreneur. One with a deep love & respect for all the mice that gave their lives to help advance this research.
Software for LED Control
Power Distribution Control Box
Antenna Tuner
Animal Living Environment
Inquire for References’ contact info.
Epilogue
Time continues to be an illusion. An oscillation, if not the superposition, of fast & slow & fast & slow. More than anything, it seems my perception determines the pace at which time passes. And as I grow older, I notice time quickening her pace.
Building this portfolio has been an exercise in pausing time & taking stock of my life, career, & relationships. And to put a mark in the sand, which may last only for a short while, that says, “Andrés was here.”
I’ve learned life’s most important lessons by surrounding myself with high quality people. And by extension, my life’s most profound & precious experiences have revealed themselves to me. I am forever grateful to the people who have helped me along the way. These are the people who challenge my thinking with their own insatiable curiosity & insistent questioning; These are the people who push me to exceed my own expectations of what I thought possible. Or better yet, to abandon my expectations entirely & focus on the process of creation instead. These are the people who value hard work over innate talent, who value reps over one-shot success, & who value unconventionality not for the sake of being contrarian, but for the sake of being true to themselves. In their care, I have been raised & continue to grow.
The results I’ve produced & shown in this portfolio speak to a deeper truth of life: It will always be spontaneous & emergent.
All I can do is make decisions & try to avoid bad ones at each turn. The consequences of my decisions are both within & without my control. It is my prerogative to judge these consequences & make meaning of them, so that I can learn. So that I can continue making decisions.
And such is the path of life, an infinite game whose point is to continue playing. There is no destination save death. And even so, there is no place I’m going to.
I have found that rules do not help in such a game. For they are, more often than not, theatrical & arbitrary. They break down because they are rigid whereas the gameplay is not. Instead, I’ve developed my own flexible principles that allow me to do what makes sense in an unpredictable, ever-unfurling universe. We can move only from where we stand, my friends. See you out there.
Principles for Life & Success
Be grateful.
Be honest.
Be present.
Be patient.
Be kind.
Perfection does not exist.
Failure is unavoidable.
Pain is unavoidable.
Suffering is optional.
Keep trying.
Always try your best.
Ask for what you want.
Question everything.
With all my love,
+1 617 939 7180
andresvelarde1776@gmail.com