Minou Emmad

CS, Physics & Math @ UIowa | 2026 Amgen Scholar

Iowa City, Iowa, United States

About

I’m Minou, a third‑year CS, Physics, and Math major at UIowa. I’m passionate about developing and applying algorithms to study physical systems. I have research experience in data‑driven work across physics, chemistry, and biology. I intend to pursue grad school in computational biology.

Experience

  • Undergraduate Researcher, Hunt Lab at Columbia University
    May 2026 - Present · 2 mos

  • Iowa Technology Institute (On-site)
    • Undergraduate Researcher, Schnieders Lab
      May 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 2 mos

      • Collaborate with Pfizer to improve binding free-energy predictions for large molecules. • Validated a state-of-the-art CpHMD pKa prediction method, improving accuracy benchmarks. • Conducted CpHMD simulations to analyze transcription factor behavior across varying pH conditions.

    • Undergraduate Researcher, Prineas Research Group
      Jan 2024 - May 2026 · 2 yrs 5 mos

      • Designed metacontact structures for mid-infrared LEDs. • Used spectroscopy techniques to characterize optical properties of metasurfaces. • Modeled the optical response of layered semiconductor structures using simulation.

  • Undergraduate Researcher, High Energy Physics Group at CMS Collaboration
    Jan 2026 - May 2026 · 5 mos

    • Developed and applied an XGBoost-based boosted decision tree (BDT) for VBF H→μμ analysis. • Designed a full ML workflow including feature engineering, cross-validation, scoring, and multi-era categorization.

  • Undergraduate Researcher, Agentic Learning AI Lab at NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
    Aug 2024 - Jan 2025 · 6 mos

    • Developed an interpretability pipeline integrating visual and depth data to improve 3D boundary localization in vision models.