Bio
I’m currently a Research Scientist at Meta working on creator-side ranking and recommendations to improve the prevalence of high-quality content in Facebook Reels.
From 2021-2026 I was a mathematics Ph.D. student at UCLA, supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and advised by Andrea Bertozzi. My research focused on deep learning and graph-based semisupervised learning theory and algorithms, and their applications to both remote and quantum sensing. You can find my dissertation here. See also my Google Scholar.
In Summer 2024, I was a research intern at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, building a transformer-based model for damage mapping after natural disasters (landslides, fires, floods) with global synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. I was mentored by Charlie Marshak and Al Handwerger. You can see an application of my work to the recent LA fires on the NASA Disasters website.
For undergrad I went to Tufts University, graduating Summa Cum Laude with degrees in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering and was a Captain on the Varsity Rowing Team. I was advised by James Murphy.
News
08/2026: I started as a Research Scientist at Meta in Menlo Park.
06/2026: I graduated from UCLA and received my PhD! My dissertation is titled Label-Efficient Machine Learning: Structure-Driven Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs and Self-Supervised Disturbance Mapping.
05/2026: I successfully defended my PhD dissertation! Thank you to my committee members: Andrea Bertozzi, Jeff Calder, Deanna Needell, and Hayden Schaeffer.
11/2025: New preprint for our paper Topology-Aware Active Learning on Graphs is available on Arxiv. This paper leverages curvature on graphs to design coreset selection and active learning routines on graphs for semi-supervised learning at low label rates, which improve over existing methods. It also introduces a rewiring strategy for multi-scale hypergraph learning that speeds up runtimes by up to 10x.
8/2025: I’m reviewing for NHESS.
3/2025: Our paper Deep Self-Supervised Disturbance Mapping with the OPERA Sentinel-1 Radiometric Terrain Corrected SAR Backscatter Product was published in IEEE JSTARS! This paper covers the work I did during my internship at JPL. IEEE link, Arxiv link.
12/2024: A preprint of our paper, GLL: A Differentiable Graph Learning Layer for Neural Networks is available on Arxiv. This paper derives a new methodology for backpropagating through a general family of graph learning equations and uses these insights to design a novel “Graph Learning Layer” (GLL).
11/2024: I passed my Oral Qualifying Exam and Advanced To PhD Candidacy! Thank you to my committee members: Andrea Bertozzi, Jeff Calder, Deanna Needell, and Hayden Schaeffer.
08/2024: I presented a poster at the Science Understanding Through Data Science Conference at Caltech.
07/2024: This summer, I’m interning at NASA JPL!
09/2023: We had a paper accepted to IEEE WHISPERS!
03/2023: This quarter I am TAing for Math 33A (Linear Algebra) and 33B (Differential Equations).
03/2023: I recieved the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship!
03/2023: I recieved the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship!
03/2023: I ran the LA Marathon in 3:53:25!
01/2023: My paper, “Deep Semi-supervised Label Propagation for SAR Image Classification” was accepted to the SPIE Conference on Defense and Remote Sensing! I am co-first author, and was lucky to be able to collaborate with Joshua Enwright (UCLA, co-first author), Jeff Calder (UMN), and Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA).
01/2023: This quarter I am TAing for Math 31B (Integration and Infinite Series).
03/2022: I passed the Numerical Analysis and “Basic” Qualifying Exams, so I’ve completed my written Qualifying Exam requirements!
12/2021: I passed the Optimization/Numerical Linear Algebra Qualifying Exam!
09/2021: I started as a PhD student at UCLA! For my first year, I am fortunate to be supported by an NSF NRT MENTOR Fellowship.
Hobbies/Personal
I was a rower in high school and college and have continued to do endurance sports since then. Now I enjoy training for marathons, cycling, and hope to start doing triathlons soon. I’m also a huge sports fan, including the NBA, NFL, college basketball and football, soccer, and pro cycling.