Matthew Newcomer Email and Phone Number

I was 10 years old when I decided that I was going to become an engineer. At 5 years old I was playing with Legos in the house, dirt bikes in the garage, and begging my dad to use the full machine shop in the basement. Being asked “what do you want to be when you grow-up” was never a difficult question for me. My father is a full-time programmer, and part time clock builder. He taught me how to maintain our home, cars, and motorcycles, and even machine at the age of 12. With his influence I quickly moved from Legos, to FRC robotics, to finishing an unfinished basement, to fully restoring a 1977 Jeep CJ5, to a robotics internship at ES&T, to a civil engineering internship at Bechtel, to designing and manufacturing my own motorcycle parts all before high school graduation! Overtime my interest developed into a passion, which often became a distraction from traditional school work as I started college. My excitement to design and manufacture my own ideas was consistently in competition with my responsibility to complete school assignments. At UMBC I quickly found that there was so much more to learn about engineering. Each class left me curious about the application of basic principles in complex systems, leading me to read into new automotive and robotics technologies trying to understand how they work. That curiosity lead to an incredible internship at a start-up racing company called Palatov Motorsports in Portland, OR. My second year I got involved with the UMBC Racing team, manufacturing parts that the team didn’t want to outsource, and attending design reviews where I listened to a group of highly intelligent masters and PHD engineering students apply those same basic principles to improve vehicle performance. After graduating from UMBC, I rode 10,000 miles around the United States on my motorcycle, spending a lot of time thinking about where to start my career. I decided to stay local and find a job in the robotics or automotive industry in Maryland. I am now a Senior Engineer at Robotic Research, feeling incredibly thankful for another exciting opportunity to continue to learn and grow as an engineer.