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I Spent a Week at LSU Talking About Robots. Here's What Happened.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana · June 7–13, 2026
A week ago I flew out to Baton Rouge, Louisiana as an all-expenses-paid guest of Louisiana State University. I spent a full week on campus presenting to students, researchers, and faculty, touring labs I had no business having access to, and eating things I definitely can't get in California. It was a lot.
The invitation came from Jason Jamerson, who runs a digital media and technology initiative at LSU. We'd connected over Zoom a few months earlier, and at some point the conversation turned into: "what if you just came out here?" I said yes. The itinerary arrived the day before I flew out, which should have been stressful and somehow wasn't.
Presenting every day
Over the course of the week I gave five presentations to five completely different audiences: a stop-motion animation class, a group of high school robotics teachers (on Zoom, ironically, while physically on campus), an undergraduate research reception, a CCT faculty and graduate student audience, and a visualization research team. Same core material, totally different rooms.
What I learned pretty quickly is that the framing matters more than the content. An art class wants to hear about animating robot faces. A group of robotics teachers wants to hear about what it means to learn by building. A research audience wants to go deep on design constraints. Adapting the same story to each room without losing the thread was probably the most useful thing I practiced all week.
| "When people walk away thinking 'that's impressive' instead of 'I could build something,' the mission has partially failed."
That realization hit hardest after the virtual teacher session, when the feedback was incredibly positive but framed around me specifically rather than the work or the community behind it. I spent the rest of the week pushing harder on the open-source angle, trying to make it clear that Sesame is bigger than any one person building it.
The labs
Between presentations, I got access to a genuinely ridiculous number of facilities. A cybersecurity lab with hardware hacking setups I was immediately jealous of. A fish genetics center that had quietly evolved into a self-sufficient manufacturing operation complete with a 3D print farm, metal printers, and a machine shop out back. A particle accelerator used for high-resolution materials analysis, housed in a building shaped like a giant hexagon.
The robotics labs ranged from familiar to actually mind-bending. The most exciting was a group working on continuum robots, which are flexible, serpentine systems with no rigid joints. They had built a hexapod walker where each leg was itself a continuum robot. I was late to the next thing because I couldn't stop asking questions about it.
There were also full machine shops, scanning electron microscopes, waterjet cutters, and a friction stir welding machine that I was keenly curious about.
What I actually took away
The academic research model is interesting to observe from the outside. The pattern across most labs was: acquire equipment, run experiments, publish results. It works, it produces real knowledge, and these teams are doing things no solo project could pull off. But my instinct is always to just build the thing first and figure out why it works later. Those are different orientations, and spending a week surrounded by the academic version made me clearer on my own.
The other thing that kept coming up was infrastructure. The fish genetics lab, the machine shops, the print farms — the cost of building a self-sufficient technical operation has dropped enough that small groups can now do it. That's not a new observation, but seeing it embodied in a room full of fish tanks and metal 3D printers made it feel real in a different way.
I came home with a copper gasket from a synchrotron vacuum chamber (single-use, the researcher just handed it to me when I asked), a food bucket list fully checked off, and a clearer sense of what the Sesame project is actually for. Not a bad week.
Thanks to Jason Jamerson and the entire LSU crew for making it happen. When people take your work seriously enough to fly you across the country, the right response is to take it seriously too. I'm trying.
Watch my full talk on YouTube:
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