Education

I earned my Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Texas at Austin in 2024, among the program's first ten graduates, and continued on to serve on the teaching staff for graduate courses in Ethics in AI and Advances in Deep Learning, covering generative modeling, memory-efficient scaling, and vision-language models. The program strengthened my foundations in deep learning, machine learning, and reinforcement learning.

I was the nerd in high school auto mechanics class, then worked as lead diagnostics technician at a Mercedes-Benz dealership. I found myself frequently on the phone with Mercedes-Benz corporate engineers, providing input on new issues for technical bulletins. I decided I should be on the other end of that phone, so I enrolled in engineering school at the University of Connecticut. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering, and later pursued graduate coursework in computer science at Harvard University Extension, studying data systems and systems programming with Harvard faculty.

At Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren specialist training

My hands-on technical training started before the formal engineering degrees. I earned Mercedes-Benz Master Technician certification at Mercedes' ELITE Academy, where I was the top graduate in my class, then achieved SLR McLaren specialist certification. My hands-on experience with physical systems has shaped how I approach software for connected vehicles and embedded systems. My technical training also includes nuclear reactor operations at Westinghouse's training center, wireless communications at Qualcomm taught by a colleague of Claude Shannon, and every available fabrication and prototyping course at TechShop.

With Robotics Legend Minoru Asada at The Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)

I love attending conferences and research events. In the past couple years I've been to NeurIPS twice, which has become a favorite for the density of new ideas and getting to meet people whose work I know. I've attended Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems conference, and Conference on Robot Learning, among many more. On the industry side, I've been to AI Summit NYC, PyData NYC, AI Week Milan, and many meetups around New York, Boston and San Francisco. I've crashed colloquia at MIT (thanks for the cookies) and participated in research workshops at MIT's Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, UT Austin's Reinforcement Learning Reading Group, and the Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School. I've also studied technology strategy at Berkeley Haas, and entrepreneurship at the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation's Innovation Accelerator Program.

Conference badges from recent events