I am from Johns Creek, Georgia, USA. I'm a software engineer developing in-cabin AI for self-driving vehicles. Since college, I've developed my interests in embodied AI and robotics and have an appreciation for science.

I was first interested in studying the brain during high school. At the time, I aspired to be a neurosurgeon, so I interned at a neurology clinic to learn more about the brain. From my studies, I observed that in neurology and medicine, there was a lot of work in correlation and not as much in causation: the field has observed lots of coincidental phenomena, but it seemed like pinpointing and understanding neurological mechanisms was rare. So, at first in my undergraduate studies, I wanted to study both mathematics and medicine to get better theories and methods for understanding biology. Trying one intersection of these two fields led to my research in cost-effectiveness modeling for a radioprotectant shield for prostate cancer under Professor Giovanni Traverso. This resulted in my first publication. On a second project with this group, I worked on a computer vision algorithm for a robotic triage of COVID-19 using a Boston Dynamics SPOT robot, which resulted in 2 publications and motivated my studies in EECS. When designing and building intelligent robotic systems, I experienced the excitement of not only scientifically understanding the physical world better but also reality-check by using that knowledge to effect positive change, which is something that has stuck with me ever since. 

As a graduate student, I joined the Learning and Intelligent Systems group to work on AI for robots and was advised by Tomas Lozano-Perez. I first focused on algorithms leveraging large language models for household robots, using them for exploration in relational model-based reinforcement learning. My exploration led me to improve exploration algorithms for learning relational models, which became my thesis.

In parallel to my undergraduate and master's years, I had the good fortune of interning at NVIDIA to develop in-cabin AI software for autonomous driving. I was excited by the development of products that improve people's lives and admired Nvidia's blending of research and productization. I have since joined full-time.