About

The first project that mattered started in my backyard. My parents were new gardeners and kept losing plants, so I built them a soil probe and an app that could tell them what was wrong. That became Plantopia, and it taught me the pattern I keep repeating: notice a real problem close to home, then build until it's solved.

The same instinct led to Waypoint, an assistant that answers questions for the 1,800 students and staff at my school, and to research on reading bone X-rays that ended up peer-reviewed and published.

I like figuring out how tools work by rebuilding them. Before I started using PyTorch, I rebuilt neural networks from scratch in NumPy and derived the gradients by hand. It helped me understand what the framework was handling. It takes longer at first, but it makes the next problem easier to understand.

A lot of my time goes into running things. I co-founded Phoenix Tech Solutions, a nonprofit that builds software for mission-driven organizations. At school, I founded and lead the competitive programming club — coaching about 30 students toward USACO — serve as an IT house leader running workshops for around 400 students, and manage funds for a 100-member Technology Student Association chapter as treasurer.

Some of that spills onto stages: a TEDx talk on what AI does to the meaning of "smart," and being selected as one of Georgia's top 45 student researchers to present at UGA's junior STEM symposium. I also work part-time at Kumon, helping kids with math and reading.