San Francisco, California, United States
I took apart every gadget I could get my hands on as a kid — the ones I couldn't put back together bothered me the most. That itch to understand how things actually work pulled me into Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at UC Berkeley, and it's led me toward the materials and processes behind sustainable energy and clean manufacturing. This past summer I was an NSF Research Intern (REU) at CASFER — the NSF Engineering Research Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production — based at Texas Tech and collaborating with labs at MIT and Georgia Tech. I worked across three fronts: fabricating and characterizing thin-film composite membranes (PTFE, polydopamine, graphene oxide, MWCNTs), studying zeolite adsorption with Joule-heating desorption for ammonia recovery, and running exploratory data analysis and classification modeling in Python on PFAS electrochemical sensor data. It taught me how a single research question pulls in membranes, materials, and machine learning all at once. Before that, in Berkeley's Bediako Lab, I worked hands-on with graphene and other 2D materials for electrochemistry — verifying monolayer samples by optical microscopy and AFM, supporting graphene transfer and device fabrication, and keeping records rigorous enough to trust months later. And three earlier summers interning across manufacturing and materials companies in India showed me the far end of the pipeline: how a reaction that works on a bench has to survive being scaled to a plant floor. Outside the lab I produce electronic music and once ran a Model UN conference as Secretary General. I'm headed toward process, materials, and energy engineering — always up for a conversation with people working in those spaces. Reach out anytime.
An NSF-funded REU at Texas Tech (TTU), working with Dr. Gerardine Botte and Dr. Behnaz Jafari inside an NSF Engineering Research Center, alongside labs at MIT and Georgia Tech. I worked across three things: fabricating PTFE/PDA thin-film composite membranes doped with graphene oxide and MWCNTs (50+ coating trials, six formulations), building a zeolite column with Joule-heating desorption to recover ammonia for distributed fertilizer production, and working through a 108-run PFAS sensor dataset in Python — a random forest hit 0.81 accuracy where the linear models stalled at 0.68. The interesting part: session-to-session drift, not the PFAS, turned out to be the biggest driver of variance, which I traced to a water-matrix confound and wrote up with fixes.
As an undergraduate researcher in the Bediako Lab at UC Berkeley, I contributed to research on graphene and other 2D materials for electrochemical applications. I verified monolayer samples using optical microscopy and AFM, supported graphene transfer and device preparation, and maintained detailed experimental records to ensure data reliability. Through hands-on work in nanoscale electrochemistry, I developed strong skills in materials characterization, clean lab workflows, and research-driven problem solving. This experience strengthened my foundation in advanced materials and prepared me for work in energy, semiconductor, and chemical engineering technologies.
Studied large-scale chlor-alkali, hydrogen-peroxide, and chlorine-liquefaction operations, documenting process flow diagrams and P&IDs to map control logic, safety interlocks, and lockout/tagout procedures. Supported plant engineers in root-cause troubleshooting of a pilot unit and performed mass-balance checks to identify process inefficiencies.
Executed pilot spray-dryer trials for scratch-resistant coatings, preparing feed suspensions and monitoring particle-size distributions to inform formulation decisions. Ran lab-scale batch reactions and QC testing (viscosity, solids content, gloss) and authored SOPs and experimental logs that improved reproducibility across iterative formulation and scale-up runs.
Developed a condenser-integration proposal to reduce liquid effluent and recover process water, estimating thermal loads and water-recovery volumes, and drafted a sustainability brief linking reduced discharge to lower wastewater costs and improved regulatory compliance.