Roger Rowe, PhD

Lead engineer at an early-stage endovascular medical device startup developing thrombectomy devices for acute deep venous thrombosis. Primary engineering authority within the organization; work directly informed $2M in grant funding and $4.2M in seed financing, with ongoing Series A interest from a top-five global medical device company.

• Translated engineering progress, test data, and technical risk into board and investor materials; served as the engineering point of contact for investor due diligence; advised leadership on technical strategy.
• Led the engineering side of IP strategy: translated device concepts and test results into defensible patent filings, owned technical documentation, worked directly with outside counsel.
• Designed a novel experimental protocol and built the custom imaging and analysis system to quantify clot fragmentation in candidate thrombectomy devices. Replaced a flawed filter-based method; improved data integrity; enabled rapid iteration before pivotal animal studies.
• Designed and delivered a functional catheter aspiration system on a one-month deadline tied to scheduled animal studies; integrated off-the-shelf components with custom SolidWorks hardware.
• Spearheaded concept, prototypes, and IP for a modular multi-tool thrombectomy platform addressing diverse clot morphologies; progress reinforced ongoing Series A interest.
• Served as Caeli-side technical lead on a development relationship with an external contract engineering firm, coordinating device- and component-level work and integrating their output into Caeli's development program.
• Operated within an ISO 13485–compliant quality management system, requiring adherence to structured design controls and documentation practices.

Contributed to the launch of a CNC aerospace job shop. Executed full manufacturing workflow from customer drawings through SolidWorks modeling, fixture design, SolidCAM programming, and CNC setup and machining of precision aerospace components. Helped establish core infrastructure (machine selection, software evaluation, workflow definition).

Applied inverse methods and regularization, the mathematical foundation underneath modern machine learning, to biological systems within an NSF-funded interdisciplinary research center.

• Extended stable viscoelastic spectrum methods to plant tissue characterization, enabling recovery of 100+ spectrum parameters from stress relaxation data, in support of climate-change crop research.
• Mentored graduate students in experimental design and quantitative analysis; supervised undergraduate independent research.

Doctoral research in nonlinear viscoelasticity, tissue mechanics, and inverse methods, conducted in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the Washington University School of Medicine. Advised by Dr. Elliot Elson.

• Conducted five years of hands-on three-dimensional tissue culture, including fabrication of cell-populated collagen constructs with primary fibroblasts and cardiomyocytes, stress relaxation testing on living and contractile tissues, and characterization of how subcellular structure shapes tissue-level mechanical behavior across length scales.
• Identified and mathematically demonstrated that experimental noise produces unbounded solutions in viscoelastic spectrum estimation from stress relaxation data; developed and published a principled regularization-based method enabling stable high-resolution characterization with 100+ parameters.
• Developed original MATLAB analysis tools for stress relaxation experiments on active tissue constructs.
• Assisted teaching mechanics courses including Dynamics, Vibrations, Mechanics of Materials, Continua, and Elasticity; mentored mechanical engineering undergraduates.
• Presented technical research domestically and internationally including through the McDonnell International Scholars Academy, whose purpose is to develop graduate students across disciplines for leadership roles. Audiences spanned engineering, medicine, business, arts and sciences, and social sciences, requiring translation of inverse-problem and viscoelastic work across disciplinary boundaries.
• Elected by department leadership to serve on the Graduate Council, first as a departmental student representative and later on the Graduate Council Executive Board.

Custom fabrication of mobile command centers and medical vehicles for government clients. Advanced from generalist to project 12V systems lead, bridging production floor, engineering, and purchasing. Led a multidisciplinary build team through the company's first on-time project in eight years (mobile dental vehicle, Florida Department of Health). Project lead on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mobile command centers.

Developed a continuum-based displacement tracking algorithm for traction microscopy, enabling measurement of cell-generated forces on highly compliant substrates where large deformations made conventional particle-tracking methods ineffective. Presented at BMES Annual Meeting 2007, Los Angeles.

Conducted optical experiments and MATLAB-based data analysis of dispersive shock wave dynamics in nonlinear optical systems used as analogs for inviscid fluid behavior.