Kai Horstmann

Graduate Student @ Cornell University

Ashburn, Virginia, United States

About

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University specializing in AI for Science. My research focuses on developing AI tools that accelerate scientific discovery by addressing practical scientific bottlenecks.

Experience

  • Visiting Researcher at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
    Aug 2025 - Present · 1 yr

    Visiting student researcher in the Branson Lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, working on AI for neuroscience within the Computation and Theory research area.

  • Machine Learning Engineer Intern at YRIKKA
    Jun 2025 - Aug 2025 · 3 mos

    Conducted research in applying inference-time scaling methods to diffusion models for infrared data generation.

  • Process-Energy-Environmental Systems Engineering (PEESE) Lab (Ithaca, New York, United States)
    • Graduate Researcher
      Jul 2024 - Jul 2025 · 1 yr 1 mo

      Involved in numerous research projects in AI for Science focused on leveraging LLMs for molecular design and peptide analysis, as well as in NLP and CV.

    • Undergraduate Researcher
      Jan 2023 - Jul 2024 · 1 yr 7 mos

      Conducted research in training and applying custom machine learning and natural language processing models to extract complex material and property relationships between materials classes of interest from chemical research literature.

  • Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    May 2024 - Aug 2024 · 4 mos

    Leveraged AWS AI services to build proof-of-concept live voice transcription and translation feature as part of the AWS Connect Voice team. Benchmarked performance of three-model AI service pipeline using standard evaluation metrics such as BLEU.

  • Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Ithaca, New York, United States)
    • CS/INFO 4300 Teaching Assistant
      Jan 2024 - Jul 2024 · 7 mos

      Served on course staff of CS/INFO 4300: Language and Information as a teaching assistant. Graded assignments, developed exam questions, held office hours to help students with course content and assignments, and aided in assignment updates and revisions.

    • CS 4740/5740 Teaching Assistant
      Aug 2023 - Dec 2023 · 5 mos

      Served on course staff of CS 4740/5740: Natural Language Processing as a teaching assistant. Graded assignments, authored and tested new programming assignments, and held office hours to help students with course content and assignments.

    • CS/INFO 4300 Teaching Assistant
      Jan 2023 - Jul 2023 · 7 mos

      Served on course staff of CS 4300: Language and Information as a teaching assistant. Graded assignments, developed exam questions, held office hours to help students with course content and assignments, and aided in assignment updates and revisions.