Meet the Team: Jesse Cornman, Director of Engineering

Meet Jesse, one of the longest tenured PSYONIC employees. He's been with us since before we were even a company! In this interview, Jesse explains how he got started at PSYONIC and what he loves most about working here.

Meet the Team: Jesse Cornman, Director of Engineering

Hi, I'm Jesse Cornman, and I'm the Director of Engineering. In a nutshell, my job is to make the hand do what it does. So I work a lot with controls and electronics, and I interface with all the engineering team leads, and basically all of the engineering decisions that go into the hands, I have a part in it.

Q1: When did you join the PSYONIC team?

My background is in electrical and computer engineering. I did a lot of personal projects in robotics. I joined back before we were even incorporated, when we were just a little research group building these blocky hands and electronics and sensors. I met Aadeel because I had an engineering mentor and so he connected me and I joined on. I had a lot of experience with my personal projects that was really useful to the group, and so I just started right away building sensors for a very old version of the hand, and I've been doing a ton of work on electronics and controls and framework for the hand ever since.

Q2: What makes your role on the team so important?

My job is important because I designed pretty much all of the electronics and wrote 90% of the firmware that goes into the hand. So everything the hand does, I basically told it how to do it. I've been around for a really long time and so I had a lot of opportunity to work on the real groundwork core technology of the hand.

Q3: What does “a day in the life” look like for you?

I wear a lot of different hats. On any given day, I could be designing a circuit board, or writing firmware for motor control, or working on one of our R&D projects. Pretty much anything to do with any form of engineering that goes into the hands is something that I might work on.

Q4: What does it take to do your job well?

Most of my day-to-day work is engineering work. There's some management work that I do as well, so you need a lot of attention to detail. You need to have a good knowledge of electronics and electricity, and a good knowledge of programming.

Q5: What is your favorite part of working at PSYONIC?

I really liked that we were doing engineering work that was helping people. What I find most fulfilling is being able to build something that helps people and also to be able to work on something that is challenging and allows me to grow and learn. It really felt like the work that I was doing was having a positive impact, instead of just some product that really didn't mean anything. The impact that it had on our users was really important to me. Also, just the caliber of the work. I was starting at a really early time in our development and so I got the opportunity to learn a ton. It was a really great learning opportunity and it was interesting.

Q6: What excites you most about PSYONIC’s future?

What's most exciting to me is all of the new things that we're going to be working on. We have a five year goal of working on an Ability Leg, and that's going to be really interesting to work on. And just seeing our company grow. I mean, I've been around since the days where we were just making rats nest breadboards and blocky plastic hands. And every single year, every single month, there's forward progress and we're always improving and growing. And so I'm just excited to see where this is headed and where things are going to go.