Daniel Lambert

Powdered Stars is a 2D physics sandbox for high-speed impacts, shock waves, and hot, reacting matter. Written in Rust, its particle-hydrodynamics solver and renderer both run on the GPU through wgpu, handling tens of thousands of particles in real time.

Scenes are built from a catalog of roughly 130 metals, alloys, ceramics, liquids, and molecular compounds. The simulation combines shock physics, optional elastic–plastic solid strength, chemistry, heat conduction, and radiation transport, with live inspection and validation tools that make the physics visible as it unfolds.

It is an exploratory sandbox rather than validated engineering software, but it is a remarkably fun way to watch metal flow, armor dent, and shock-heated matter react.

From 2021 to 2024, I served as Principal Engineer at Lumineye, leading engineering for portable through-wall radar systems that detect and track people behind walls. The work supported military commands and federal agencies, including systems developed under contract with Air Force Special Operations Command and other special operations organizations.

The federal SBIR portfolio for Lumineye records four Phase I awards and one Phase II award from the Army and Air Force, totaling more than $1 million. The Phase II effort adapted Lumineye’s commercial sensing technology for AFSOC personnel recovery and humanitarian and disaster-relief missions.

Before I joined, Lumineye had also won the Army’s second xTechSearch competition. Task & Purpose covered the award, the portable radar, and its use of signal analysis to distinguish moving and breathing people through walls.

For two years I served as a systems engineer on a Boise State team studying bone-cell signaling in microgravity. I designed the ratiometric fluorometer and supported the experiment during NASA reduced-gravity flight operations. I flew on the vomit comet, I didn’t puke.