Summary
Jack Defay is an engineer, researcher, and founder based in Cambridge, MA with nine years of experience turning academic research into practical products across AI, robotics, and digital preservation. He built and scaled a marketing agency before pivoting to founding Museum Scan, applying 3D scanning and AR/VR to preserve cultural artifacts and enable educational and fabrication workflows. His Masters work at Princeton combined hardware-integrated computer vision for underwater swarm robots with synthetic data pipelines that reduce reliance on costly human annotation. Comfortable from low-level electronics and prototyping to high-dimensional ML systems, he blends hands-on fabrication experience from Cornell’s rapid prototyping lab with rigorous research methods. Notably, his projects emphasize co-design between sensors, control, and learning algorithms to make cutting-edge research deployable in constrained, real-world settings.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Lexington High School
Bachelor of Science - BS Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University
Stockholm International School
Masters Computer Science, Masters Computer Science at Princeton University