Deanna Hood
Senior Robotics Engineer at Vexev
Lisbon, Portugal
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDeanna Hood is a Senior Robotics Engineer with 12 years of experience building medical and assistive robots that solve high-impact societal problems, from precision bioprinting for burn care to medical imaging for vascular surgeons. She combines systems-level firmware and electronics expertise with ROS 2 core development—her open-source contributions span rclpy, rcl, rclcpp and rviz, projects used even in NASA missions. At Inventia she integrated KUKA LBR Med robots for cell-printing therapies and at Vexev she now architects algorithms for safe, repeatable 3D arterial models to improve dialysis outcomes. A dual university medallist in mathematics and electrical engineering with a top-ranked VIBOT MSc, she pairs rigorous academic training with hands-on product delivery across startups, research labs and open-source ecosystems. Fluent in remote collaboration (living in 11 cities across 7 countries) she is as comfortable leading CI/buildfarm and QA automation work for OpenCV as she is designing human-robot interaction for children with handwriting difficulties. Her career reflects a consistent mission: apply robotics to measurable health and education impact while advancing community tooling in ROS and vision.
12 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor Mathematics / Bachelor Engineering (Electrical), Engineers Australia Medal for B.Eng.; University Medal for B.Maths (top 0.5%), Bachelor Mathematics / Bachelor Engineering (Electrical), Engineers Australia Medal for B.Eng.; University Medal for B.Maths (top 0.5%) at Queensland University of TechnologyErasmus Mundus European Masters of Computer Vision and Robotics (VIBOT), 1st place; first Australian to receive full scholarship from European Commission, Erasmus Mundus European Masters of Computer Vision and Robotics (VIBOT), 1st place; first Australian to receive full scholarship from European Commission at EPFL, Universite de Bourgogne, Universitat de Girona, and Heriot-Watt University
Github Skills (38)
opencv10
debug10
c-language10
geometry10
python10
rc10
testing10
qos10
c1110
c1710
geo10
msg10
regression-testing10
executor10
rcpp10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
ros2/rclpy
Apr 2016 - Sep 2018
rclpy (ROS Client Library for Python)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 41 PRs, 85 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Deanna primarily contributed to the core implementation of the rclpy library, which is a ROS client library for Python. Their work included refactoring code, fixing bugs, and adding new features, such as support for logging via rcutils. They made changes to several key files related to logging, time management and service interaction, demonstrating a good understanding of the library's internal workings. The user's contributions resulted in improvements to the functionality and overall maintainability of the library.
client-librarypythonrosrclpy
ros2/ros1_bridge
Nov 2016 - Jun 2018
ROS 2 package that provides bidirectional communication between ROS 1 and ROS 2
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 commits, 20 PRs, 39 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Deanna contributed to the bidirectional communication between ROS 1 and ROS 2, focusing on bridging topics, handling different message types, and improving the overall functionality of the bridge. They refactored and added options for bridging all topics, exposing command-line options, and modifying the code to update ament_index_python API. The changes included modifying publisher profiles for reliability.
bidirectional-communicationroboticsros2communicationros-2
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