About Me
I am a highly motivated software developer capable of working flexibly on a team. I'm also eager to learn from and teach others. Below is a list of my academic and work history.
For things I work on in my free time, check out the Projects page.
April 2017–May 2021: Worked as a coding teacher at Young Ivy Academy in Pleasanton. Taught essentials of Python, JavaScript, and Scratch to elementary and middle school kids for four years. Came up with my own teaching materials, including engaging programming projects.
April 2020: Received a $2,500 National Merit Scholarship, awarded to just 2,500 high school seniors in the U.S. each year.
September 2020–June 2024: Studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering. Recipient of UCLA Regents Scholarship.
October 2020–Present: Joined Electron Losses and Fields Investigation (ELFIN), a satellite mission at UCLA studying space weather in Earth's radiation belts.
Maintained Python ground software used by satellite operators to plan science collections. Built a Python FastAPI service from the ground up to automate attitude control simulations in Julia and IDL.
Designed and developed core flight software components in C for CEPHEIDS, a future mission. Also designing FPGAs for next-gen Energized Particle Detector instrument on CEPHEIDS.
June 2021–September 2022: Hired at Apton Biosystems (since acquired by Pacific Biosciences) as summer intern. Single-handedly developed a web platform with Vue and Node.js for scientists to monitor the performance of their runs at a glance. Wrote Node extension in C++ with Samtools integration to accelerate BAM file parsing tasks.
After the summer, continued to work on C# software for instrument control, a data processing pipeline, and a script compiler.
The following summer, optimized base calling process by porting ML inference from GPUs to FPGAs. Responsible for a 4× improvement in both speed and power efficiency.
June 2023–September 2023: Interned at JPL under the Flight Software Applications group, working on the Vision Compute Element Flight Software (VCEFSW) of the Sample Retrieval Lander for the Mars Sample Return mission.
November 2023–June 2024: Joined the Complex Networks Group under Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury. Evaluating the performance of DNA-ESA, a transformer model based on BERT for DNA sequence alignment. DNA-ESA is currently over 97% accurate at aligning 250-length reads onto a reference human genome of 3.4 gigabases.
Evaluated the effectiveness of Llama-3-based AI Observer model at creating Generative Semantic Workspaces, a "working memory" to understand actors, roles, and states in news stories and crime reports.
June 2024–September 2024: Interned at Millennium Space Systems as a Flight Software developer, adding Golay error detection and correction (EDAC) capabilities to bootloader software, and integrating said bootloader into the next-generation flight software platform. Improved test coverage, continuous integration, and streamlined build processes across several flight software repositories.
September 2024–June 2025 (expected): Pursuing Computer Science M.S. at the University of California, Los Angeles, under faculty advisor Prof. Saadia Gabriel.