- Responsive Environments
Dr. Patrick Chwalek is a researcher who recently earned his PhD from the MIT Media Lab's Responsive Environments Group. His doctoral research focused on developing cross-contextual sensing technologies to bridge the gap between human-centric insights and wildlife conservation. His work involved designing, engineering, and deploying a suite of novel platforms to capture holistic, contextual insights in real-world environments.
His projects explore human well-being through AirSpecs, a smart-eyeglass platform he created to holistically measure a person's proximate environment and physiological state, which was validated in a multi-site international study on human comfort "in-the-wild". Pivoting to the ecological domain, he engineered BuzzCam, a specialized acoustic sensor for pollinator monitoring that uses on-device AI to classify endangered and invasive bee species in Patagonia. He is now focused on CollarID, a versatile, multi-modal animal-borne platform integrating inertial, bioacoustic, and comprehensive environmental sensing to move beyond the limitations of location-only wildlife tracking.
Before joining the MIT Media Lab in 2018, Patrick worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for three years, focusing on wearable embedded systems for physiological monitoring and remote surveillance systems. He has also worked at a startup where he architected a wildfire detection system and spent a summer with the National Geographic Exploration Technology Lab, building technology for their Explorers to use in the field. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.