About me

Hi! I am Joseph Johnnie. I work as a research and development engineer in the medical device industry.

My background

I grew up in Milwaukee, spent some time on the east coast in Washington DC, and Houston, TX is my home now. I studied biology, engineering, and literature in college, and did research in synthetic biology in grad school.

Previous work

I had been involved in rep rap as a hobbyist during university and really got excited about 3D printing because it offered so many prototyping possibilities. I have been involved as a hobbyist in local makerspaces (e.g. TxRx, MakerBarn, TechShop, and FabLab Houston) and professionally, I have done a lot of protoyping work developing endoscopic products that are used in colonoscopies and bronchoscopies. Regulatory approval for a medical device usually requires locking down a final design, and extensive testing to prove that the design for that product works. It costs a lot of money to manufacture and test the first batch of production for a medical device (e.g. on the order of hundreds of thousands for class I/II devices that are like current products, to millions for novel class III devices (implantables) that require animal/human testing and pre-market approval). Before spending all that money, engineers will often test prototypes at lower cost and iterate through a variety of designs to build confidence that their final design will work

Project

I am really interested in 3D Printing applications to biology. As an overall set of projects, I would like to explore additive manufacturing, but with the constraint that I use materials found in eggs (e.g. egg yolk, egg white, and/or eggshell).