William Emfinger
Chief Technology Officer at Vanderbilt University
Nashville-Davidson, Tennessee, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Emfinger is a technology executive and systems engineer with 13 years of experience building robotics, embedded, and cyber-physical systems, currently serving as CTO at Assistive Technology Development Inc. He leads ATDev’s role as Principal Investigator on a $41M ARPA-H open-source robotic mobility program and directs full product lifecycles from hardware to UE5-based simulation. With a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt, he bridges academic research and mass-market medical devices, having shipped low-latency, power-efficient firmware for products used by millions and designed FDA Class II robotic devices. His technical strengths include C/C++, Python, RTOS and ESP32/ARM platforms, SLAM and learning-enabled autonomy, plus a penchant for model-based and hardware-in-the-loop development. An advocate and contributor to open-source tooling (espp, ROSMOD) and an adjunct faculty member advising aerospace and satellite projects, he combines rigorous research methods with practical commercialization instincts. Notably, he applies game-engine simulation and sodium-ion hardware experimentation to accelerate safe, real-world assistive robotics deployment.
13 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Electrical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Electrical Engineering at Vanderbilt University
English
Github Skills (200)
code-generation10
visual-studio10
state-machine10
nes-emulator10
csv-parsing10
cpp10
robotics10
espressif10
arcade10
mission-control10
nodejs10
regl10
visualization10
hierarchical10
cytoscapejs10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
esp-cpp/camera-streamer
Nov 2022 - Dec 2024
Example for ESP32 TimerCam rebuilt using ESPP to stream MJPEG video over the network using RTSP.
Contributions:9 releases, 13 PRs, 53 pushes in 2 years 2 months
cppcamerastreamingesp8266stream
esp-cpp/esp-box-emu
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
NES, Gameboy/Color, Sega Master System / GameGear, and Sega Genesis / MegaDrive Emulators running on ESP BOX and ESP BOX-3 with a custom gamepad
Contributions:27 releases, 145 commits, 152 PRs in 2 months
gameboygame-boyemulatorsemulatorgameboy-color
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