I'm 19. I'm a CS sophomore at Rutgers. And honestly, the thing that gets me out of bed is the moment right before something works for the first time.
I got into this because I wanted to understand how things move. I did FIRST Robotics for four years in high school and showed up to college already knowing I didn't want to just take classes about building things. I wanted to actually build them. So I found two research labs (one in robotics ML, one applying transformers to genomic data), picked up an ML fellowship through Cornell Tech, and kept saying yes to anything that scared me a little. (I also started a Girls Who Code chapter back in high school because I care about getting more women into this space.)
The project that changed how I think was a latte art robot I built at a hackathon in San Francisco. I was teaching a robot arm to pour milk through physical demonstration. Watching it actually pour, even rough around the edges, clicked something for me. That's the kind of work I want to be doing. ML that touches the real world and does something you can see.
I learn by doing. Every project I care about started the same way: I didn't know how to do it, so I went and figured it out.
Give me a messy problem, some autonomy, and a tight loop between building and learning. That's where I'm happiest.
I'm not trying to have all the answers. I'm trying to ask better questions every week than I did the week before.
Robotics ML. Building models for regime classification in high-dimensional dynamical systems.
Computational genomics. Transformer-based sequence models for fungicide resistance prediction in fungal genomes.
NLP for misinformation detection. Built transformer pipelines across 170K+ news articles. Improved accuracy by ~20% and reduced test cycles by 35%.
Applied ML. Building production pipelines with industry partners through Cornell Tech.
Competitive robotics. Leading programming for competition robots. 1st place NJ, 22nd internationally at VEX Worlds 2025.