Jeff Rolland's Portfolio Page
(BSME in Mechanical Engineering; Ph.D. in Math; 9 Credits Towards an MSCE in Control Engineering)


Email: DeadbeatJeffSDF@gmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deadbeatjeff/
GitHub: https://github.com/DeadbeatJeff?tab=repositories



Goal:
Obtain a Full-Time Job in Mechanical and/or Control Engineering

Goal:
Obtain Applied Logic Certificate from PLC Dojo

Goal:
Finish Genus-2 Torus Control Law Program
A picture of me  "If you can dream it, you can do it!"  
"I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing: that it was all started by a [drawing of a] mouse." - W. Disney #ItsUhTheStuffThatDreamsAreMadeOf

This is the kind of control engineering I would really like to do https://deadbeatjeff.sdf.org/mathjax/optimalControl.html
AI says this is a good career choice for me https://gemini.google.com/share/33ec7d5264ff


My dream job: Working on robot soldiers for the military that are sent on missions where the expected casualty rate is too high for, say, SEAL Team 6, Delta Force, or CIA SAC, (The robots in the video are not real - yet.)
Update: A classmate tells me there's a big problem with the power source in robot soldiers https://g.co/gemini/share/5a615d037a23

Secondary dream job: Cruise missiles, drones, and the like are the control engineering of autonomous vehicles meets military applications (in the same sense that reinforcement learning is control engineering meets data science). Neural networks are the way of the future!




I'd settle for working on Boston Dynamic's Atlas, Tesla's Optimus, or on Tesla's autonomous vehicles (AV) programs for their cars or semi-trailer trucks.

Work Experience::
1) I have a part-time position at Luetzow Industries converting one of their printing presses from manual control to programmable logic control (PLC). (Feb 2026 - Present)
2) I had a part-time SURF undergraduate research grant at UWM to use digital inline holographic microscopy (DIHM) to classify micro-organisms in real time with machine learning. (Sep 2025 - Dec 2025)
3) I had a full-time co-op at Copeland Corporation (formerly a division of Emerson) in Sidney, OH working in Data Science. (Aug 2023 - Aug 2024)
4) I had a full-time internship at AngleLock by Controlled Dynamics in Grafton, WI working in Mechanical Engineering. (May 2023 - Aug 2024)

Project Experience:
1) My ME 496 Senior Design project, a PLC replacing manual control for a 1960's Faustel Flexo plastic bag printing press for Luetzow Industries (Sep 2025 - Dec 2025)
2) My ME 379 Mechatronics project, a home computer numeric control (CNC) machine, designed with my design team. (Feb 2025 - May 2025)
3) My ME 270 Computer-Aided Design project, the Boll Aero toy airplane engine, designed with my design partner. (Feb 2025 - May 2025)
4) The first link in a 6D robot arm (Aug 2023)
5) A 2D robot arm (Aug 2023) (3D print Dec 2023)
6) My ME 111 Fundamentals of Engineering II project, an outlet lock, designed for Master Lock, Inc. with my design team. (Feb 2023 - May 2023)

Mathematics Research:
(Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3IUdT2EAAAAJ)
(Orcid ID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0167-670X))
(Math Genealogy Project https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=190149 [I am a descendant of Bing (!)])

Research Interests: My Ph.D. is in smooth manifolds under Craig Guilbault. Smooth manifolds find applications as configuration spaces (c-spaces) (the underlying sets of "generalized coordinates" - "generalized coordinates" are really just a coordinate patch on a smooth manifold to a topologist) with Lagrangians on them in system dynamics in mechanical and control engineering.I intend to apply my manifold topology to optimal geometric control theory (optimal control engineering on manifolds) real-world problems, hopefully in the autonomous robots and/or autonomous vehicles industries. I have a blog related to my learning experiences in these new areas of STEM, This Week's Finds in Second-Order Ordinary Differential Equations on Manifolds and Geometric Control Theory.

Publications:
"\(\mathcal{EZ}\)-Structures for Group Extensions of Fundamental Groups of Manifold K(G,1)'s with \(\mathcal{EZ}\)-Structures", on hold
"Some Examples of Pseudo-Collars on High-Dimensional Manifolds with Non-Superperfect Kernel Groups", on hold
"Some Examples of Pseudo-Collars on High-Dimensional Manifolds with Non-Split-Exact Group Extensions", on hold
"A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for a Self-Diffeomorphism of a Smooth Manifold to be the Time-1 Map of the Flow of a Differential Equation" https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12806, unpublished
"More Examples of Pseudo-Collar Structures on High-Dimensional Manifolds", Topology and its Applications, Vol. 270, February 2020 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02597 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166864118305716
"A Geometric Reverse to the Plus Construction and Some Examples of Pseudo-Collars on High-Dimensional Manifold", Michigan Mathematical Journal, Vol. 67 No. 3, August 2018 https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03670 https://projecteuclid.org/journals/michigan-mathematical-journal/volume-67/issue-3/A-Geometric-Reverse-to-the-Plus-Construction-and-Some-Examples/10.1307/mmj/1522980163.short
"Some Results on Pseudo-Collar Structures on High-Dimensional Manifolds", doctoral dissertation, May 2015 http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04338 https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/916/

Presentations:
UWM Topology Seminar 2025 (UW-Milwaukee)
UWM Topology Seminar 2021 (UW-Milwaukee)
UWM Topology Seminar 2020 (UW-Milwaukee) [Revised - Original slides]
Workshop in Geometric Topology 2016 (Colorado College)
Dissertation Defense (01/2015) (UW-Milwaukee)
Workshop in Geometric Topology 2014 (UW-Milwaukee)
Workshop in Geometric Topology 2009 (UW-Milwaukee)

Hosting for this site is provided by

The SDF Public Access UNIX System

DeadbeatJeffSDF@gmail.com My Twitter BlogSpot Logo LinkedIn GitHub Repo