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Profile · Leo Szeto

About

I'm an engineer and technical creative who finds the order inside complex systems — and builds what's never existed before. My work has followed an arc from Imagineering to Big Science: I started out making the magic behind extraordinary attractions move safely and on cue, and today I build control systems at the frontier of physics and research. What ties it together is the craft of making remarkable physical machines behave — turning noisy, high-stakes problems into something ordered, repeatable, and new.

History

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I was born in Hong Kong in 1988 and immigrated to the United States in 1998, as my parents wanted better educational opportunities for me and my sister. After graduating from Westmoor High School in the class of 2006, I attended Skyline College and City College of San Francisco to pursue my B.S. While there, I developed an interest in robotics, embedded systems, and computer programming. I later moved to Southern California to attend UCLA and have been in Los Angeles since.

It's my hope that I'll be able to continue my studies in mechatronics, with a future career goal of being a senior engineer at a research and development lab.

Courses

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Game Development and Mobile

  • Make Virtual Reality Games in C# with Unity — Ben Tristem
  • The Complete iOS 8 and Swift Course — Rob Percival

Automation Systems

  • ControlLogix PLC Programming and Configuration — Rockwell Automation
  • Siemens S7 PLC Programming and Configuration — Siemens

Talks

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Public speaking is one of my hobbies, and I've often jumped at the chance to share what I've learned — professionally and personally — with others. I've given numerous talks on leadership and building impactful change to engineers and high-school students, both domestically and internationally.

Recognition

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HSSEAS Featured Student

Selected by the UCLA School of Engineering as an exemplary student in the Electrical Engineering department for 2012.

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Student Group of the Year

Under my leadership as Project Manager (2010–2011) and President (2011–2012), UCLA IEEE grew to better serve the EE community on campus and received the ESUC Student Group of the Year award two years running.

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Ingenuity

My team and I won first place in an annual Rube Goldberg engineering competition against other student groups — featured on the front page of the Daily Bruin.

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Creativity

An avid percussion player, I performed with a band of UCLA engineers in the annual Engineering Talent Show and received 3rd place in 2011.

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"Leo is one of the finest students and colleagues I have dealt with in my nine years of teaching at UCLA. He combines great personality, creativity, and leadership with a true hardware geek's passions. I believe that he is happiest when he is working on a new hardware project."