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Gabriel Marcano

Computer Science and Engineering

Gabriel Marcano
Gabriel was born in upstate New York as the son of Dominican graduate students at Cornell University. Once his father completed his PhD, his family moved to the Dominican Republic, hoping to establish themselves so that Gabriel and his younger brother, would be able to grow up with their extended family. When Gabriel was 10, due to economic hardships and seeking a better life, Gabriel's parents made the tough decision to transplant their family to Worcester, Massachusetts. From early on, Gabriel showed interest in electronics (and video games), and as such he spent a lot of his time experimenting with computers. In his inner-city high school, Gabriel was the unofficial (and only) computer technician, fixing and maintaining the 10 year old computers, projectors and printers. Gabriel went on to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology, focusing on software architecture and design, but also discovered his love for tinkering with hardware and computer architecture. After obtaining his B.S. in Software Engineering, he moved to northern Virginia to work for the MITRE Corporation. In his 5 years there, he worked mostly on research projects involving embedded systems, from stand off, handheld hyperspectral sensors, to low power, high performance embedded systems programming for autonomous vehicles. While working on these projects, Gabriel realized that there was room for improvement, and that "the more you know, the more you know you don't know”. He decided to pursue a PhD at UC San Diego in embedded systems architecture and design with the hopes that he will be able to develop systems to help improve people's quality of life, especially those in more remote areas of the world.