Bio

MS Computer Science, George Mason University

BS Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University

BS Theatre, Northwestern University

My goals

I'm a public interest technologist, data scientist, and ML technologist currently working as a data science consultant at eQual.

Read below to see how my past experience positions me to succeed in public interest tech and motivated me to pursue social equity.

Undergraduate student at Northwestern University

While studying mechanical engineering for my undergraduate, I focused my efforts on philanthropic uses for STEM, and nurtured a growing interest in computer science.  My work mentoring incarcerated high school students in digital music showed me how digital tools can delight, bring hope to, and materially aid people who are marginalized.  Entering the CS research environment for an NSF REU, I grappled with data collection, 3D computer vision using compound video sources, and particle cloud tracking.  I eagerly cultivated skills in these topics, proactively asking faculty about the traits of various 3D sensors and formulating computer vision algorithms with my peers.  By the end of that experience, I had developed the beginning of a computer vision library for tracking the position and orientation of a rat head in 3D space, selected an appropriate 3D sensor for that project, and co-built an experiment to track dense clouds of bubbles for flow visualization.  Simultaneously, I designed and taught a project-based course in robotics as a lab outreach program, and began to TA a similar course.  On the tail of an invigorating REU experience, I chose to continue my computational work professionally, while focusing on directly helping others.

KID Museum

To this end, I joined KID Museum, a DC-area STEM education nonprofit for elementary and middle school students.  At KID Museum, I gave one-on-one Python and Raspberry Pi classes, as well as hands-on group lessons in NLP, Arduino, Micro Bit, Scratch, Lego Mindstorms, and machine theory.  I steered our educational content toward socially conscious coding workshops, such as emotional wellness apps and contagion models, to help students better process the experience of living in a pandemic.  I used a steady flow of personal projects to inspire students, including a tic-tac-toe AI, an evolution simulator, and a program to protect peaceful protesters by translating jargon on legal police scanners.  Throughout this work, I helped children take control of the programmable world around them.  However, my drive for computational scope and social reach outgrew KID Museum's domain, so I began a graduate program in computer science.

Graduate student at George Mason University

To equip myself with the skills to develop more intricate and impactful public interest projects, I undertook a computer science MS with an emphasis on machine learning, AI fairness, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics.  I spent a year and a half working as a paid researcher in the INSPIRED Lab of Dr. Brittany Johnson, where I developed a tool to improve the ease of debugging machine learning models, including removing unethical biases from models deployed in society.  At the same time, I joined some projects in robotics for social good, volunteering in the DCXR Lab of Dr. Lap-Fai (Craig) Yu, where we collaborated with another lab in Taiwan to create a teleoperated robot that can be used in search-and-rescue contexts.

Post-graduate career

From June through October 2023, I worked as a Data Science Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau. I'm currently a contracted data scientis with eQual.

With my master's degree, professional experience working in federal government, and research experience, I can develop intricate and impactful solutions for social problems.

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