Q: How do you like to start your morning before a workday?

C: I start the day by eating breakfast and doing the Wordle over coffee. ThruWave has a very active Wordle Slack channel.

Q: Tell us about your background. How did that lead you to start thinking about 3D mmWave imaging?

C: I’ve always been interested in science, and knew pretty quickly going into college that I wanted to be a physics major. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I started working on projects and research that explored novel and interesting ways to image outside the visible spectrum. I did most of my graduate work on THz imaging before moving into mmWave imaging in my post doc at UW. I became really fascinated with the idea of taking something that we’re all familiar with, taking a picture, and turning it on its head – how do we make the image 3D? How do we image scenes that we can’t with a typical camera? With ThruWave, we took those questions and added – how can we use mmWave imaging to revolutionize the supply chain and material handling?

Q: How did the name ThruWave come about?

C: Matt, Andreas, and I had a long brainstorming session one day while we were at UW where we talked about the next steps for starting a company. There were a lot of ideas on the whiteboard, but I think we chose ThruWave because it represents some of our technology’s core value: mmWave imaging that can see through materials.

Q: What is the most exciting thing to you about what ThruWave is doing?

C: For many of our customers, we’re giving them insight into their processes in a way that hasn’t been possible for them before. Existing information, such as manifests or barcodes, can only provide a piece of the puzzle. Our technology is able to look inside the box to verify goods across multiple parts of the supply chain and gives our customers peace of mind about their process.

Q: Where do you see the company in five years?

C: The growth that I’m most excited to see is in our company operations. We have sound technology that can solve pain points for a lot of customers, but I think the next five years are going to be largely about scaling to serve multiple customers in complex environments. In five years, ThruWave will be an integral part of the material handling and supply chain operations for several key customers, including actional feedback to improve and optimize their operations.

Q: Why did you start/join this company?

C: I was super excited by the technology that was being developed during my post-doc work, but more than that, the reason I chose to be a part of founding ThruWave is because I really believed in our team. We were coming in with some of the best technical knowledge in the field, and Matt brought important business acumen from his last startups. Not to mention we all just generally like each other and work well together.

Q: What do you like to do outside of the office?

C: I grew up in Seattle, and all my immediate family still lives here, so if I’m not working, I’m usually hanging out with my family. I also love to travel, and try to take at least a few trips a year.

Q: What’s the most used app on your phone?

C: The most used apps on my phone are work apps (Slack, etc.), but outside that my most used app is my podcast app. I listen to tons of podcasts – comedy, news, music, I like them all.

Q: What are you currently binge watching?

C: My husband and I just finished Season 1 of The Bear, about the ins and outs of a kitchen of a popular Chicago sandwich restaurant. I thought working at a startup was stressful – working in a kitchen is a whole different story!

Q: What’s the name of the last book you read?

C: Station Eleven. I was a little weary to read a book with a pandemic as a major plot point (for obvious reasons), but it’s a really beautiful story.