About

Hi 👋🏻 I'm Swapnil Bhatkar. I live in Seattle, Washington. I work at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, US Department of Energy as a Senior HPC and Cloud ML Infrastructure Engineer for the Advanced Computing Operations team.

My long term vision is to build autonomous drones that run on-device ML models, powered by hydrogen fuel cells and long-term battery storage — pushing the boundaries of what's possible in clean energy and AI. I'm nowhere close to the final product yet, but these systems I'm building are like puzzle pieces – they'll eventually click together to solve hard problems in our industry

I'm guided by first-principles thinking (because "that's how we've always done it" is my least favorite phrase), a relentless curiosity to understand how things work, and a knack for connecting the dots between ideas and technologies.

While I love deploying at scale to the cloud, I'm a DIY engineer who finds joy in running a privacy-first infrastructure on my homelab servers. This includes hosting my own private cloud that powers this website, local LLMs, journals, photos, documents, media files, email servers, chat applications, VPNs, and even a privacy-focused search engine — all thanks to the incredible open-source community for making this possible 🙌🏻

Some might speculate I'm building my version of Jarvis by constantly feeding it all sorts of training data from drone footage, photos, documents, emails, and chats that matches my writing style. I neither confirm nor deny these allegations (but I'm not saying it's 100% true either).

I love to hike, fly drones, play cricket and football (soccer 😏), and travel across the globe mainly for conferences but every now and then you will find me either at the top of a mountain catching my breath or swirling a glass of Moscato at a vineyard.

Education

• Stanford University, Stanford Center for Professional Development

  Professional Certificate in Energy Innovation and Emerging Technologies (September 2023)

• New York University, Tandon School of Engineering

  Master of Science in Management of Technology

  Brooklyn, NY (May 2018)

• Mumbai University, Don Bosco Institute of Technology

  Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering

  Mumbai, India (June 2015)

Professional Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Professional
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate
• AWS Certified Security Specialty
• Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer
• HashiCorp certified Terraform Associate

Talks

• Event-driven data transfers using Globus, Globus Conference 2023, Chicago

• Scale HPC computing environments for CryoEM workloads, AWS Public Sector Summit 2021, Washington D.C

Publications

• High Throughput, High Resolution CryoEM Data Collection,

  Microscopy and Microanalysis, Volume 25, Supplement S2, August 2019, pp. 1394-1395.

  Authors: William J. Rice, Anchi Cheng, Sargis Dallakyan, Swapnil Bhatkar, Shaker Krit, Edward T. Eng, Bridget Carragher, and Clinton S. Potter

• Stion-A software as a Service for Cryo-EM data processing on AWS

  Authors: Swapnil Bhatkar, Edward Eng, Micah Rapp, Evan Bollig, Aniket Deshpande