About Me

Hi, I'm Dave Bulkin — a Principal Software Engineer at MathWorks, where I specialize in graphics and data visualization. I work on MATLAB's core graphics system, building tools that help scientists and engineers communicate complex data clearly and powerfully. My contributions include features like nexttile, swarmchart, bubblechart, and bubblecloud. Lately, I've been focused on bringing MATLAB graphics to the cloud and lowering the barriers to sharing rich, interactive visualizations on the web — so researchers can focus on discovery, not deployment. I hope this work empowers scientists and engineers to create graphics that don't just inform, but stand out — visuals that feel at home in a modern, attention-driven digital world.

Before becoming a software engineer, I was a neuroscientist. During my PhD in Jenni Groh's lab at Duke, I studied how the brain integrates sight and sound. As a postdoc in David Smith's lab at Cornell, I investigated how the hippocampus encodes memory and resolves interference. Later, in Melissa Warden's lab, also at Cornell, I helped develop new techniques that combined endoscopic calcium imaging with tissue clearing and genetic analysis — tools for exploring the brain with unprecedented resolution.

Through that work, I found myself building both computational tools and user interfaces to analyze neural data and process 3D microscopic imaging — and I fell in love with designing software: creating tools that make complex data easier to work with, and building interfaces that feel intuitive and empowering. It reconnected me with my roots — years earlier, I worked at FedEx writing software to integrate customer systems with FedEx's shipping infrastructure, automating the entire order-to-ship-to-notify workflow. That same passion drives me today, especially when I'm collaborating with brilliant colleagues to solve tough problems.

Outside of work, you'll probably find me baking bread, biking around Rhode Island, or tinkering with hobby software projects. I think it's important for developers to donate their time to projects that make the world a little better. I recently worked on ROIVert, a software tool to accompany a microscope-building fly-brain-imaging teaching project. The professors had developed ingenious hardware and a powerful curriculum; the missing piece was usable software — and I was thrilled to help bridge that gap. If you have a software need, please reach out!

Thanks for visiting, and drop me a line if you have any questions.