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)
benchmark10
code-generation10
state-machine10
cpp10
robotics10
espressif10
runnable10
touchscreen10
checksum10
reflection10
lvgl10
visualization10
cytoscapejs10
nativescript-plugin10
plotly-dash10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
esp-cpp/wireless-debug-display
Sep 2023 - Oct 2025
Use an ESP32 + Display to show debug graphs and text logs from another system via UDP
Contributions:6 releases, 20 PRs, 31 pushes in 2 years 1 month
esp32udpdebugging-tooldisplayesp-idf
esp-cpp/template
Jul 2023 - Jun 2026
Template repository for building an ESP app with ESP++ (espp) components and ESP-IDF components.
Contributions:3 releases, 2 PRs, 56 pushes in 2 years 11 months
esp-idf
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