Elliott Donlon
From Honolulu, HI
Lives & works in Cambridge, MA
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2018 - 2020 M.S. in Mechanical Engineering
Olin College
2010 - 2014 B.S. in Engineering: Systems
Cumulative 3.68 GPA
Recipient of 4-year, 50% Olin Merit Scholarship
Punahou School
Graduated: June 2010
Honors Diploma, 3.8 GPA
Skills
Software: SolidWorks, Onshape, DipTrace, GitHub.
Fabrication: 3-D Printers, mill, lathe, drills, saws, MIG welding, sheet metal tools, water jet, laser cutter, metal and polymer casting.
Laboratory: FTIR, TGA, DSC, DMA, Various Mechanical Testers, various programmable furnaces, optical and SE microscopy, recrystallization, vacuum filtration, chromatography, photolithography.
Experience
2020 - Current Giner Inc - Staff Engineer II
•Supporting project management of Giner's aerospace class electrolyzers and fuel cells for oxygen and power generation to support crew life.
2018 - 2020 Domestic Water Usage and Sanitation Systems in Indian Villages
•Worked with Professor Amos Winter to identify areas of opportunity for technological innovation in Indian sanitation.
•Developed a framework to assess fitness of current solutions against adequate service requirements through technoeconomic and multi-criteria analyses.
2016 - 2018 Reactive Gripper Development
•Designed and built robot fingers with integrated sensing and reactive actuation.
•Created a high-fidelity tactile sensor building on prior work of collaborators.
•Co-authored successful 75k seed funding proposal with Lab PI Alberto Rodriguez.
2015 - 2018 Design and Fabrication for MIT’s Manipulations and Mechanisms Lab
•Designed and built robotic manipulation research platforms for data collection.
•Led the design, fabrication and system integration of the Team MIT robot for the Amazon Picking Challenge where we placed 2nd out of ~30 teams in 2015, 3rd and 4th in 2016, and 1st in the 2017 Stowing task.
2013 - 2014 Improving Fabrication of Microfluidic Chips – Senior Capstone Project
•Created a new fabrication work-flow for microfluidic devices.
•Designed a machine to rapidly hot-emboss micro-features onto plastic substrate.
Fall 2013 Jimmy-M – Mechanical Design Course Project
•Designed an expressive, open-source humanoid robot for 3-D printing.
•Attained walking, turning and four independent motions with only 4 high-performance Servos to keep price of the 2-ft humanoid below $500
Activities and Outreach
Spring 2018-2020 MIT Glass Lab Junior Instructor
•Taught fundamentals of glass blowing to beginner students via demonstration, assistance feedback, troubleshooting and safety instruction. Assisted in maintenance of shop resources.
Fall 2017-2020 MIT MakerWorkshop Mentor
•Trained shop users and run the shop as volunteer staff; Advanced Hand Tools Machine Master: Organized trainings, maintained machines and established use protocol.
Dec 2014 - Mar 2015 Glass Workshop Volunteer Work at Entre Amigos – San Pancho, Nayarit, Mexico
•Designed a glass kiln utilizing only toasters and other available scrap materials.
•Empowered Mexican artists to supplement their income with new glass-making skills, a newly-acquired hot process and new products utilizing recycled material.
2013-2014 3-D Printing Czar– Creating a 3-D Printing Lab at Olin College
•Led a team in the creation of a free-for-student-use 3-D print space at Olin College.
•Modified budget desktop 3-D printing technologies to experiment with new materials, material recycling and print optimization.
Awards and Honors
2018 MIT Tata Center Research Fellow
2018 NSF Graduate Research Fellow
2016 Most Potential for Impact" award at MIT ESI's Annual Hackathon for Climate Change
Publications
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Donlon, E., Dong, S., Liu, M., Li, J., Adelson, E., & Rodriguez, A. (2018). GelSlim: A High-Resolution, Compact, Robust, and Calibrated Tactile-sensing Finger. In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. article. (Amazon Research Awards Best Manipulation Paper Finalist)
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Zeng, A., Song, S., Yu, K., Donlon, E., Hogan, F. R., Bauza, M., … Rodriguez, A. (2018). Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching. In The International Conference on Robotics and Automation. (Amazon Research Awards Best Systems Paper)
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Fazeli, N., Donlon, E., Drumwright, E., & Rodriguez, A. (2017). Empirical Evaluation of Common Contact Models for Planar Impact. In The International Conference on Robotics and Automation (pp. 3418–3425).
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Ross, C., Donlon, E., Kessler, A., Lee, C., Xiang, H., Jaffe, C. C., & Bloch, B. N. (2015). Patient and Structure Specific Quality Assurance Phantom Insert for Radiation Therapy of Prostate Cancer. Journal of Medical Devices, 9(2), 20938.