About Me

I am a PhD Candidate advised by Prof. Julia Hockenmaier at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Before that, I completed my undergraduate studies at Duke University, where I majored in computer science and statistics with a minor in mathematics. At Duke, I explored applications of machine learning to hardware research under Prof. Krishnendu Chakrabarty, then Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Research

My research lies at the intersection of Representation Learning and Energy-based Models, building systems that can learn robust representations via latent-space prediction to jointly align multimodal/lingual data.

Work

I have worked in both academic and industrial research settings.

• I’ll be joining Balyasny Asset Management this upcoming summer as a Quantitative Research Intern on their Systematic Strategies arm. If you’re in NYC, I’d love to connect!
• At Pinterest, I integrated vision-language model features into large-scale recommendation systems, improving ranking quality and efficiency across major surfaces such as Homefeed.
• At Epsilon, I developed large-scale similarity search and LLM-based synthetic labeling systems for personalized advertising.
• At Elemental Cognition, I extended semantic role labeling and named-entity recognition to document-level tasks, enabling real-time LLM-guided search.
• At IBM Research, I contributed to hybrid-cloud and quantum computing projects, optimizing large-scale Optical Proximity Correction and Electronic Design Automation workflows.
• At Mi-Corporation, I built enterprise .NET software solutions used by U.S. state agricultural departments.

Hobbies

My main hobbies are music production, exercising, and cooking.