Aaron Kushner, Ph.D.

Bio-inspired materials scientist and inventor · now an AI-native builder of research systems, engineering programs, and public education content.

akushnerphd.me · aaron.m.kushner@gmail.com · 510-914-4096 · SF Bay Area

Statement

What made Jobs a stand-out success was not just intellect — it was also the combination of intuition and experiential wisdom he felt was an asymmetric innovation booster. I am Gen-X with a Ph.D. in Chemistry, and a documented record of exceptional non-linear/lateral thinking and intuition resulting in multi-disciplinary innovations — two materials patents and a self-healing polymer platform that came from asking what engineering materials problems nature already solved, and extracting the core reproducible nano-engineering design.

My last two years are effectively the experiment: one non-engineer, an AI workbench I built myself, and a set of programs that would each have required a funded team.

I also possess the skills, awareness, empathy, and experience required to lead a team. The era of Jobs, Musk, and Gates required a harsh personality to convert vision into shipped product. It no longer does. AI, harnessed properly ("Personal AGI"), supports and encourages the drive and focus that used to demand a difficult leader. The other brutal requirement is gone too: manually separating A-players from B-players by force of personal judgment. With a provenance-documented build and performance record at every seat, people self-sort on evidence. What remains scarce is the thing the machine cannot supply — taste, cross-domain intuition, and knowing which problem is worth solving... there too quantity/quality of output in terms of company (and personal/professional) value generation is now more easily assessed.

AI practice — three and a half years (Git records available on request)

Dec 2022
Opened an OpenAI account seventeen days after ChatGPT was released to the public. First paid use February 2023. A research instrument at this stage rather than a build tool — expert-role prompting across chemistry, materials, and market questions. Interesting and incrementally efficiency enhancing.[NIH proposal available on request]
Mar 2024
ChatGPT Plus. The GPT‑4 era — daily working use across research, writing, and code, cut and paste to VS Code.[Skills: Python · scripted data handling · long-form document generation]
Apr–Dec 2025
ChatGPT Pro. Built independently, browser to VS Code:NormaSky — an air-traffic anomaly detector: a masked-autoencoder transformer trained on millions of rows of ADS-B state vectors to learn normal traffic and flag deviation from it, with a live dashboard; cloud-GPU training, drafted for publication.SmartColumn — predicts flash-chromatography conditions from molecular structure and emits them as vendor-specific method parameters for automated purification systems, with a post-run intake that returns observed results as correction data.Also a multi-aircraft collision-avoidance simulation with logged experiments and a web viewer, an adaptive Mandarin tutor with speech-signal analysis and per-user skill tracking, a literature-harvesting pipeline over journal supporting information, and Unity XR work. Versioned by copying folders and stamping the date — the tooling could not carry state between sessions.[Skills: Python · PyTorch / PyTorch Lightning · scikit-learn · pandas · NumPy · Streamlit · FastAPI · Flask · Docker · cloud GPU (A100) · Trino / Parquet · Supabase · Next.js · Unity/C# · Git · Vercel]
Dec 2025
Switched to Claude.
Mar 2026 —
First Claude Code session, 11 March. Everything measured below starts here.[Skills: LoRA fine-tuning (FLUX.1-dev) · pre-registered model evaluation]

The measured record

14,912commits since 30 March 2026, across ten repositories and 70 project directories — counted 25 September 2026
101,387model turns in June–July 2026 alone
42.2 billiontokens of model context processed in that same two-month window
173 millionoutput tokens generated — drafts, code, analysis, artifacts
14,902prompts across 910 working sessions on the primary console, 11 March – 5 September 2026, when the work moved to the workstation workbench
1person — no engineering staff, no external development budget

The practice is not prompting. It is systems design: parallel collaborating specialist agents with both deep knowledge and defined scopes, memory that survives session termination, verification gates that block unevidenced claims, and a documented behavioral layer refined continuously against real failures.

Proof in results

See akushnerphd.me — every program with its full description and current state.

Selected pre-AI record

NSF Convergence Accelerator proposal — the PRE-VIS Kit · ScaledNano, Inc., with Cornell University and University of Dayton
Principal author of a trans-disciplinary ed-tech/av-tech crossover research proposal: a Parallel Reverse Engineering Virtual STEM kit using bio-inspired design — students reverse-engineer a bird and a “birdplane” in parallel — targeting 12–15-year-olds, the developmental window that most shapes STEM career interest and mathematical self-efficacy, with an explicit focus on underrepresented and underserved populations, domestically and in India. Full proposal available on request.
CEO / CTO, GK Materials · 2012–2015
Commercialized a bio-inspired self-healing polymer platform.
Postdoctoral Researcher, Guan Lab, UC Irvine · 2010–2012
Developed new project directions; mentored undergraduate researchers.
Research Associate, Advanced Medicine / Theravance · 1999–2003
Medicinal chemistry.
Consulting · Drywired LLC (nanocoating IP, 2020–2021) · GPH Private Equity (materials and materials-informatics investments, 2016–present)

Education

Ph.D., Bio-inspired Nanomaterials
University of California, Irvine · 2010
B.S., Organic Chemistry
University of California, Berkeley · 1999
Electrical & Mechanical Engineering
Laney College · coursework, self-directed toward the aircraft program
The College Preparatory School
Oakland, California · 1994

Patents & publications

Patents: Bio-inspired method to obtain multifunctional dynamic nanocomposites · Synthesis of multiphase self-healing polymers from commodity monomers.

Selected publications: Forced unfolding of single-chain polymeric nanoparticles · Direct correlation of single-molecule behavior with bulk mechanical properties for a biomimetic polymer · Supramolecular block copolymers for self-healing thermoplastic elastomers · Multiphase design of autonomic self-healing materials · Modular design in natural and biomimetic soft materials · A biomimetic modular polymer with tough and adaptive properties · Biomimetic design of a reversibly unfolding cross-linker to enhance mechanical properties of 3D network polymers.

Technical skills — AI systems

Agentic development · LLM APIs, orchestration, and prompt systems · Retrieval, RAG, and vector stores · Evaluation and assurance · Infrastructure and deployment · Secure SDLC and AI-specific risk · Measurement.