Data Systems & Automation Engineer

Jesse Anderson

Chemical engineer turned computer scientist. BS ChemE at UIC, MCS at UIUC, with six peer-reviewed papers in microscopy image analysis along the way. I build automation-heavy data systems: pipelines, dashboards, IoT sensor networks, and the scripting that ties workflows together.

labor-hours automated across roles
3000+
peer-reviewed publications
6
systems that run in the browser
Rust -> Wasm

Currently at G5 Environmental. Open to conversations about Rust, data systems, and scientific computing.

Featured work

A few projects worth looking at first

4 projects with the clearest proof of shipped systems. The full project list follows below.

01

Numerical Computing

linreg-core

A Rust regression core that ships to the browser, Python, and Excel/VBA from one implementation. Published on crates.io, exposed through Wasm/PyO3/FFI, and validated against R and Python outputs.

How it works

Built to replace one-off spreadsheet and notebook regression code with a single tested numerical core. It implements ordinary, weighted, ridge, and lasso regression plus fit diagnostics: residual standard error, R², adjusted R², t-stats, F-stat, leverage, and Cook’s distance.

The same core runs browser-side through wasm-bindgen, in notebooks through PyO3, and in legacy Excel workflows through a small FFI dll callable from VBA. Outputs are checked against R and statsmodels coefficients and standard errors within numerical tolerance.

  • Rust
  • WebAssembly
  • PyO3
  • wasm-bindgen
  • FFI
  • VBA
  • Python
Linreg-core LOESS fitting.
02

Data Engineering

Oak Park Crime Data Pipeline & Map

Nightly Raspberry Pi ETL for Oak Park incident reports: ingest public data, normalize fields, geocode incidents, publish Parquet, and serve a static map queried locally with DuckDB-WASM.

How it works

Oak Park publishes incident data, but residents do not get a useful spatial reporting layer. This fills that gap without a server: nightly ETL pulls the latest source data, normalizes fields, geocodes incidents, and publishes a Parquet artifact.

The app itself is static. The browser downloads the dataset and runs SQL locally through DuckDB-WASM, so hosting stays simple and cheap while still supporting fast map filtering and exploration. NLP passes over incident narratives feed the companion dashboard.

  • Python
  • DuckDB-WASM
  • Raspberry Pi
  • ETL
  • GitHub Pages
  • NLP
  • Folium
Oak Park crime tracker map
03

Data Science

Oak Park Crime Data Science Dashboard

Analysis layer for the Oak Park crime dataset: temporal cohorts, weather and demographic context, topic discovery, semantic similarity, and Rust/Wasm browser-side search and scoring.

How it works

The original map answers where incidents happened. The dashboard asks compared with what: year-over-year deltas, seasonal patterns, holiday and weather cohorts, demographic context, and related incidents.

ETL produces Parquet and JSON artifacts for a Vite/React app. A Rust core compiled to WebAssembly handles BM25 search, similarity scoring, and embedding lookups client-side. Topic discovery uses BAAI/bge embeddings, UMAP, HDBSCAN, and c-TF-IDF labels, with larger binary artifacts hosted on Cloudflare R2.

  • Python
  • Rust
  • WebAssembly
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Vite
  • BM25
  • UMAP
  • HDBSCAN
  • BAAI/bge embeddings
  • Cloudflare
Oak Park crime data science dashboard
04

Embedded Systems

Industrial IoT Sensor Network

Indoor air-quality monitors built around ESP32 nodes, SCD41 CO₂/temperature/humidity sensing, and PMS7003 particulate sensing. Readings are batched to multiple database/API targets; the original hardware has stayed in multi-month deployment.

How it works

Long-running indoor air-quality monitoring that survives the hostile parts of real deployment. Each ESP32 node owns its sensors, batches readings, and posts telemetry to multiple storage targets rather than depending on one service.

The deployed systems have run for months on the original hardware. The writeups cover firmware, sensor choices, soldering and power fixes, and the reliability issues that showed up once the monitor left the breadboard.

  • ESP32
  • HTTP APIs
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Python
  • SCD41
  • PMS7003
  • Raspberry Pi
Pi sensor network architecture diagram

All projects

Everything else

Grouped by domain. Click a heading to expand or collapse.

Software & Web 6

xll-rs

  • Rust
  • Excel
  • XLL
  • Windows
  • FFI

Rust runtime and support library for building native Excel XLL add-ins on Windows. Ships typed Rust functions as Excel cell formulas without ever touching the C XLL SDK, an import library, or a C compiler. Sits underneath `linreg-core`'s VBA/XLL bindings as the actual interop layer.

xll-utils

  • Rust
  • PE/COFF
  • Excel
  • XLL

Build-time tooling for the xll-rs ecosystem. Parses PE/COFF metadata from a compiled XLL and validates that the exported function set matches what Excel will accept at load time. Catches the "looks fine, won't load" class of bugs before they hit production.

DuckDB Playground

  • JavaScript
  • DuckDB-WASM
  • WebAssembly
  • SQL

Browser-based SQL playground using DuckDB-WASM. Write and execute SQL queries directly in the browser against sample datasets, no server required, all computation happens client-side via WebAssembly.

NBack brain training game.

N-Back Trainer

  • Rust
  • WebAssembly
  • Tauri
  • IndexedDB
  • Piper TTS

Browser-based working-memory trainer with adaptive difficulty. Single, dual, triple, and quad N-back modes across position, audio, shape, and color streams. The hot path runs in Rust compiled to WebAssembly. A Bayesian particle filter with 500 particles tracks per-stream skill in real time and adjusts the N level to keep accuracy near the 80% target. Desktop builds via Tauri; persistent history through IndexedDB; audio cues via Piper TTS.

Scientific graph comparison tool screenshot showing Pre creatine post creatine difference.

Scientific Graph Digitizer

  • JavaScript
  • WebAssembly
  • Canvas
  • Python
  • Tkinter

Measure bar heights, marker positions, and curve points directly off rasterized scientific figures or PDFs without redrawing the chart. Crop to ROI, drop a baseline, place an axis tick, and the tool computes percent-of-control or absolute values across treatments. Started life as a Python/Tkinter desktop tool; the in-browser successor is faster and more featured.

tools.jesse-anderson.net

  • JavaScript
  • WebAssembly
  • Rust
  • Cloudflare Pages

The home for the in-browser tools listed elsewhere on this page (graph digitizer, DBSCAN visualizer, AI image detector, HED calculator, toxicology body burden, oral multidose simulator) plus smaller utilities that did not warrant their own card. Static site, no backend, heavy compute via Rust compiled to WebAssembly.

Machine Learning 6
AI Image detector showing a scanned image and the resulting power / polar spectrum, the azimuthal sum, and the radial falloff.

AI Image Detector

  • JavaScript
  • WebAssembly
  • FFT
  • Canvas

Frequency-domain analysis tool for distinguishing AI-generated images from photographs. Computes 2D FFTs of image patches and visualizes the noise spectrum; AI-generated images carry characteristic high-frequency signatures that diffusion-model post-processing does not fully erase.

Face Blur Tool

  • JavaScript
  • TensorFlow.js
  • Face Detection API
  • Canvas

Browser-based face detection and anonymization tool. Uses real-time face detection to automatically blur faces in uploaded images for privacy protection.

Token Throughput Visualizer

  • JavaScript
  • Canvas
  • LLM APIs

Real-time visualization of LLM token generation rates. Tracks and displays tokens-per-second throughput during inference, helping developers understand model performance characteristics.

GAN generated MNIST digits

VAE-GAN on MNIST

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • VAE
  • GAN
  • Autoencoders

A walk through training a Variational Autoencoder Generative Adversarial Network on MNIST, with a Denoising Autoencoder, plain VAE, and plain GAN built first as comparison points.

Python clustering toolbox GUI

Python Clustering Toolbox

  • Python
  • scikit-learn
  • DBSCAN
  • OPTICS
  • Ripley's K

A small GUI for running Ripley's K/L, DBSCAN, and OPTICS on point data. Built originally for single-molecule localization microscopy work; useful anywhere you have 2D points and want to ask spatial-statistics questions about them.

Pharmacology & PK 3

Academic work modeling drug absorption and toxicology. Not professional practice, but research into pharmacokinetics and dose-response relationships.

Image of the oral multidose calculator with the standard 3 cups of coffee.

Oral Multi-Dose PK Simulator

  • JavaScript
  • WebAssembly
  • Pharmacokinetics
  • ODE solver

Pharmacokinetic simulator for oral dosing regimens. Single or repeated doses, first-order absorption and elimination, with concentration-time profiles and the standard PK metrics (Cmax, Tmax, AUC, half-life, accumulation ratio) computed live as parameters change. Monte Carlo simulation to simulate uncertainty in elimination kinetics.

HED Calculator

  • JavaScript
  • Pharmacology
  • BSA

Translates preclinical animal doses to Human Equivalent Doses via body-surface-area normalization. Standard FDA guidance scaling factors, with the inverse calculation (human → animal) for forward dose-finding work in study design.

Toxicology Body Burden

  • JavaScript
  • Pharmacology
  • Toxicology
  • Vd modeling

Estimates total systemic load of a substance from a measured plasma concentration using volume-of-distribution models, with optional kinetic back-calculation to estimate exposure history.

Chemical Engineering 3

Chemical engineering projects: process modeling, reactor design, and environmental applications.

Senior design process flow

Senior Design — Bio-Process Plant

  • Aspen Plus
  • SuperPro Designer
  • Process Design

A bacterial 1,3-propanediol plant simulated end-to-end at ~60,000 tons/year throughput. Bioreactor sizing, downstream distillation train, utility integration, and full economic analysis. Won 1st place in the UIC ChemE division of the 2023 Engineering Expo.

Smog model output

Smog Modeling in LA

  • MATLAB
  • Reaction Engineering

Reactor-engineering model of smog accumulation and depletion across the Los Angeles basin. CSTR-style mass balances on key precursors solved in MATLAB.

Yogurt CFU evolution over time during fermentation.

Yogurt CFU/g Estimator

  • JavaScript
  • Fermentation kinetics
  • Gompertz model
  • Microbial growth

Fermentation-kinetics simulator for home and small-batch yogurt. Models S. thermophilus and L. bulgaricus co-culture growth with temperature-dependent rate constants, lag-plus-plateau kinetics, and pH feedback through a modified Gompertz acidification curve. Forecasts CFU/g and pH trajectory through fermentation and refrigerated post-acidification, with confidence envelopes anchored to published literature values.

Publications

Peer-reviewed work

Six co-authored papers in microscopy image analysis and computational biology. Pulled live from ORCID at build time.

Canonical list: ORCID ↗

Experience

Where I've worked

Sep 2024 – Present

Chicago, IL

Engineer · G5 Environmental

  • Architect and deploy embedded sensor modules (ESP32, pressure, RPM, GPS) to optimize fleet reliability.
  • Develop automated Python testing workflows (pytest) and hardware-in-the-loop validation scripts to verify system behavior.
  • Diagnose hydraulic leaks and electrical faults by analyzing sensor data logs, reducing diagnostic time.
  • ESP32
  • Python
  • pytest
  • HIL

Jun 2023 – Apr 2024

Northbrook, IL

Engineer · UL Solutions

  • Built Python and VBA automation that eliminated 500+ hours/year of repetitive engineering workflows.
  • Wrote a Python tool using OpenCV and PyMuPDF that detects changes between CAD revisions and surfaces them to engineers automatically.
  • Established an ETL pipeline that cut redundant analytical work by 400 hours/year.
  • Built C#/.NET and VBA tools to modernize legacy workflows, codifying SME knowledge into repeatable processes.
  • Used C#/.NET Office Interop to drive Word report generation directly from Excel data sources.
  • Python
  • VBA
  • OpenCV
  • PyMuPDF
  • C#
  • .NET
  • Office Interop

Dec 2020 – Jun 2023

Chicago, IL

Research Assistant · University of Illinois Chicago

  • Developed MATLAB and R pipelines for biological image analysis using DBSCAN, OPTICS, and Ripley's K.
  • Co-authored six peer-reviewed papers in journals including Scientific Reports and Biophysical Journal.
  • Optimized a numerical bottleneck so a multi-hour lab operation finished in seconds.
  • MATLAB
  • R
  • Python
  • DBSCAN
  • OPTICS
  • Ripley's K

May 2022 – Aug 2022

Waukegan, IL

Engineering Intern · United Conveyor Corporation

  • Wrote software to automate ~150 hours/year of data entry and materials analysis to ASME, AWWA, and PPI standards.
  • Built a library of VBA tools for thermoplastic and thermoset material property analysis used across the engineering team.
  • VBA
  • Excel
  • P&ID

Jun 2016 – Aug 2019

Chicago, IL

Safety/Project Manager · G5 Environmental

  • Served as project lead at job sites by ensuring completion of contract requirements by CDL team members.
  • Ensured safe execution of mechanical repairs by mechanics.
  • CDL
  • Site Management
  • Safety Compliance

Jul 2018 – Aug 2018

Remote Locations

Equipment Technician · Remote Area Medical ❤️

  • Volunteer to assist medical providers in providing care in remote areas to underserved populations.
  • Maintain generators, hydraulic/pneumatic dental tools, mix sanitizing agents on site, and worksite preparations.
  • Disposal of hazardous waste post treatment.
  • Equipment Maintenance
  • Generators
  • Hazardous Waste

Education

Schools

Master of Computer Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Urbana, IL

GPA 4.00

  • Coursework spans cloud computing, applied machine learning, distributed systems, scientific visualization, applied statistics, databases, and data cleaning.
  • Professional Master of Computer Science (MCS) program.

BS Chemical Engineering

University of Illinois Chicago · Chicago, IL

GPA 3.77

  • Concentrations in Biochemical Engineering and Process Automation.
  • Minor in Mathematics & Computer Science (data structures in C++, discrete math, two Python courses, 400-level industrial mathematics).

Associate of Science

College of DuPage · Glen Ellyn, IL

GPA 3.65

  • Coursework in chemistry, biology, and mathematics.
  • Presented at the college research symposium on learned helplessness.

Writing

From the technical blog

Long-form writeups live at blog.jesse-anderson.net. The most recent three are pulled at build time.

Full archive at blog.jesse-anderson.net ↗