Mechanical Engineer — Product Development

Engineering hardware for how people compete.

I'm a product development engineer who works at the intersection of mechanical design and human performance — from a wearable that reads a basketball player's shot mechanics in real time, to manufacturing-ready consumer hardware. Currently a Mechanical Designer II at Ghafari Associates in Chicago, and building toward R&D work in sports equipment and athlete performance technology.

BASEDChicago, IL
CURRENT ROLEMechanical Designer II, Ghafari Associates
EDUCATIONBS '24 · MS '25, Mechanical Engineering, Purdue
FOCUSSports equipment & performance R&D

Selected work

05 SHOWN — FULL INDEX →
01 / SENIOR CAPSTONE · ME 463

Artemis Shot‑Sync

A wireless IMU sleeve that reads a basketball player's elbow angle, release angle, and shoulder acceleration in real time and turns it into shot-by-shot coaching feedback. Six-person team, first-listed lead — thermal and structural FEA, sensor fusion, BOM & margin analysis down to the component.

WEARABLES IMU / BLE FEA BIOMECHANICS
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02 / UNDERGRAD RESEARCH

Basketball Shot Biomechanics

Built a low-cost, dual-camera computer-vision rig to extract joint-angle kinematics from Purdue D1 basketball players — including National Player of the Year Zach Edey — to separate makes from misses.

MATLAB COMPUTER VISION
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03 / SOLO PROJECT · ME 557

DFM/DFA: Injection-Molded Cube

Solo manufacturability teardown of a 3x3 mechanical puzzle — Boothroyd-Dewhurst analysis, mold cost and tonnage selection, and per-part cost modeling.

DFM / DFA INJECTION MOLDING
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04 / TEAM PROJECT · ME 263

Height-Adjustable Wheelchair

Full design lifecycle for a scissor-lever wheelchair mechanism — concept generation through QFD, CAD, BOM costing, and NPV/ROI justification.

SOLIDWORKS MECHANISM DESIGN
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05 / UNDERGRAD RESEARCH · ME 498

PORTLAB Field Contamination Reader

Owned mechanical integration and enclosure design for a portable fluorescence-based food-safety detector — iterating through 3D-printed tolerance failures to a working field unit.

ENCLOSURE CAD SYSTEM INTEGRATION
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How I work

I get closest to the problem, not the CAD. The Shot-Sync capstone started because our team wanted to know why a jump shot goes in — that meant building the motion-capture rig ourselves, learning what data actually correlates with a make, and only then designing the hardware around it.

I quantify what most student projects hand-wave. Thermal margins, drop-test displacement, injection-mold cycle time, unit economics at 2,500 units/year — if a design decision can be modeled, I model it before I prototype it.

I document failure as carefully as success. BLE packet loss capped our wearable's test runs; a bad 3D-print tolerance broke an early enclosure revision. Both are in the reports, with the fix.

Toolkit

Design & Analysis
SolidWorks Fusion 360 FEA (thermal/structural) DFM / DFA GD&T
Code & Data
MATLAB Python Computer vision Sensor fusion / Kalman filtering
Hardware
IMU / BLE wearables Arduino / embedded control 3D printing & enclosure design
Process
QFD / House of Quality BOM & cost modeling Concept selection matrices