About

Last updated: November 16, 2025

Technical Background

The real start of my academic life was middle school. Early on, I became very interested in math competitions, competing mainly in MATHCOUNTS and a few local competitions. This was by and large the one thing I focused on in middle school. Although, I did join my school's Science Bowl team in 8th grade.

However, when COVID hit during my 8th-grade spring, canceling the competitions I had been preparing for, I largely lost interest in math competitions. I continued going to a few local competitions and doing AMC/AIME, but I never spent much time studying. I began focusing more on taking higher-level math and physics classes rather than getting better at competitive math, but I still had some extra time on my hands. With this newly found time, I got into programming after taking a CS class my freshman year.

I also became more active in other extracurriculars throughout high school: Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), CS Club and Honors Society, and I continued with Science Bowl. I spent varying amounts of time and energy on these; I spent by far the most time on Science Bowl, becoming captain of the team for a couple of years and specializing in physics, math, chemistry, earth and space, and some general energy knowledge. Even at the height of my Science Bowl studying, it was still basically just a for-fun thing. FBLA was also largely a for-fun endeavor with some friends but I did end up with quite a few high placements in competitions at the local and state levels, as well as getting 2nd place at nationals in Economics. As for CS Club and Honors Society, I was tech leader my sophomore year and president my junior and senior years. As an organization, we competed at local competitions, helped organize school-wide Hour of Code sessions, and began our annual city-wide hackathon with participants from most local middle and high schools.

The main thing I focused on in high school was my internship. The summer after my freshman year, I was brought on as a very casual, low-level intern at a local surgical robotics startup. The following summer, they offered me an actual internship position. I accepted and ended up working there right up until I left for college. By my account, this was by far the most influential experience I had in high school, both in terms of technical ability and general skill-building (public speaking, research, etc.).

The first project I worked on was designing a new position-estimation algorithm to calculate motor position angles from inertial measurement unit readings. I spent a decent amount of time on this project and later worked on various other projects, including creating a comms protocol for bootloader reflashing, extensive data analysis/visualization and workspace analysis for FDA certification, writing a robot simulation library for internal use, and eventually some ML projects.

The first few ML projects I worked on were largely CNN-based: surgery-stage identification and some image segmentation work. I then moved on to working on some early autonomous suturing and surgery R&D. This work used an ACT (action chunking transformer) architecture and produced promising results, but it ultimately got cut short when I left for college.

While I greatly enjoyed the work I did in high school, I felt that I would not be satisfied if I continued doing the same work for the rest of my career. As a result, I decided to pursue physics as I entered undergrad at MIT. I mainly focused on classes my first year but began research the following summer.

Over the summer, I worked with my advisor Paul Schechter on studying gravitational lensing in clusters of galaxies. Specifically, I worked to introduce a new lightweight, analytic approach for estimating the centers of gravitational potentials for clusters of galaxies. I also did some analysis comparing these estimates with other tracers, giving some insights into the structure of Abell 1689. I wrote up these results in a first-author paper submitted to ApJ and presented them as a remote contributor at the 2025 Scaling-Up Lensing Workshop at the University of Liège.

I have continued working on this research, specifically applying the method to more clusters and working on a new approach for finding the fourth images of known triplets that may be possible quartets. However, my attention has also been pulled toward the field of AI safety lately.

This semester I took part in MAIA's AI Safety Fundamentals Fellowship and attended AISST's AI safety workshop. These experiences, in addition to other readings and personal research, have convinced me of the huge risks associated with continued AI development, most notably extinction risk (x-risk). I believe these risks are currently neglected by the majority of society and will be hugely disruptive if more attention and effort is not put into AI safety.

As a result, I am currently leaning toward working in AI safety rather than physics. I am still deciding where in the field would be best for me, but I am considering control, scalable oversight, evals, and developing better training methods to help mitigate x-risk. However, I also believe there is currently a large gap between the technical and policy sides of AI safety, and I am heavily considering finding a position in which I would be able to better bridge this gap.

Technical Interests

I don't have very specific interests (usually finding interest in a wide variety of subjects) but there are two general trends I have become aware of:

Data Analysis — I love reaching understanding from complex data. This is probably the strongest unifier of all the research projects I have worked on. It is commonly understood that the best way to display understanding is to teach something. I believe this is also true for data, the best way to show understanding is the ability to visualize it clearly.

Signal-Rich Problems — I do not like guess-and-check type projects. I like working on hard problems that have a strong progress signal. This is not to say that I only want to work on things I know will lead to results but rather I want to work on topics where results come from understanding rather than guesswork.

Personal Interests

I also have many interests outside of technical topics:

Climbing — I got into climbing the summer after my junior year of high school. I instantly got hooked on the combination of physical and mental aspects of the sport. Ever since, I have climbed consistently (around 3-4 days a week) except for a couple months here and there.

Movies — I got into movies during winter break of my junior year of high school. I had been forming a list of movies I wanted to watch and ended up binging them during break. I started with Whiplash and ended up watching 21 movies in around 15 days. I obviously haven't kept up that pace but have continued to watch movies regularly and post reviews on my Letterboxd profile.

Reading — As a kid, I hated reading but I got more into it in high school thanks to a fantastic teacher I had from 10th-12th grade. I try to read as often as I can and am usually pretty good at finding time for it. I mostly read existential and philosophical fiction works and productivity and psychology non-fiction books, trying my best to keep a good balance between fiction and non-fiction. You can see what I've read on my Goodreads profile.

Music — I also wasn't a big fan of music as a kid but many of my work friends in high school were very into music and slowly got me into it. I chose music as my HASS (humanities, arts, and social sciences) concentration at MIT, taking most of the offered classical and jazz theory courses. I listen to a fairly wide variety of stuff but mostly jazz, soul, r&b, and hip-hop.

Physical Media — I believe physical items have more influence than digital ones. As a result, I've gotten more and more into physical media as time has gone on. I love learning about old media formats and even have a film camera and vinyl setup in my dorm.

Stationery — I really enjoy having nice versions of daily objects, specifically tools for my work. In high school, I got really into mechanical keyboards, but I am now more interested in stationery. I have a collection of many different mechanical and Blackwing pencils, pens (including a Parker Jotter and Lamy Studio), and notebooks.

History of Science — I love learning about things, including learning about how humans have learned things. I believe the history of science is massively neglected by most modern scientists despite its huge value in the lessons it teaches.

and many, many other things.