Tyler Folsom, PhD

Founder

FOUNDER, Micro-AV SPC

Dr. Tyler Folsom focuses decades of experience in software, robotics, and automated vehicles on environmentally friendly urban transportation. If automation lives up to its promise of safer traffic, it opens the door to increasing the share of city trips on micromobility. Automating ultra-light vehicles can choreograph them into vibrant and orderly people-movers.

At Quest Integrated, he was PI for SBIRs from NSF, U.S. Air Force, Navy and Army and has taken a project to Phases II, II+ and commercialization. He participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge races for autonomous vehicles. He co-founded Cogneta Inc. to commercialize driverless vehicles in 2007, but the effort was premature. He then started the open-source Elcano Project to make automated vehicles accessible to students. Prof. Folsom was hired part-time by the Bothell campus of the University of Washington where he teaches classes on Embedded Systems and Autonomous Vehicles.

Dr. Folsom’s research has been supported by about 80 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Washington. They have written software, designed several generations of printed circuit boards, and designed mechanical systems.

Brandyn Lacourse

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Brandyn has a wide range of experience from senior program manager identity and access operations to intelligence engineer to cybersecurity infrastructure operator in both private and public sectors. His experience has afforded him multiple opportunities to explore various aspects of government contract and acquisition management, defense, intelligence, countering human trafficking and bulk cash smuggling, cyber/physical resilience engineering, counter narcotics/firearms interdiction, transnational organized crime, various aspects of fraud and strategic enterprise risk management and field operations. He has been happily working alongside Dr. Folsom since late 2013.

Joe Justice

Board of Directors

Joe applied agile to automotive manufacturing in 2006, founding Team WIKISPEED, and set 4 world records. Joe has worked with all 3 of the largest military and defense contractors, autonomous and smart road technologies, ultra-lightweight structures. Joe's work has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, CNN Money, the Discovery Channel, and others.

Rob Cotter

Board of Directors

Founder of Organic Transit, which builds a practical human/electric/solar powered hybrid vehicle.

Paul Beard

Security & Project Manager

Expertise in hardware and software development, as well as infrastructure design and implementation. Significant experience in business systems analysis and business process architecture. Extensive experience managing teams and providing technical leadership and senior level resolution to large scale projects.

Sheila Slick, MS

Technology & Marketing

Master of Science in Leadership and Bachelor of Science in Marketing. Over 20 years of global business experience working on multinational projects to promote international business development. Recognized for ability to educate, mentor, and motivate adults and students in business and leadership concepts through technology and innovative approaches to develop public interest in STEM-related industries.

Duc Truong, CPA

Accounting

Adonay Lebeneh

Electrical Engineer and Software Engineer

Boeing Electrical Engineer and Software Engineer. Working on embedded systems projects. Assembled most of our scale model vehicles, including printing 3D parts.

Alex (Zhengzhi) Lin

Machine Learning Research Team Lead

Software stack designer and developer for autonomous vehicle that integrates ROS, Mavlink, and Ardupilot.

Patrick Cheng

Computer Vision Researcher

Researcher of vision system for autonomous vehicles, focused on object detection, object tracking, and image segmentation.

Tracy (Yijin) Wang

Team Member

Mathematical models for lane edge detection