Hello! I’m a computer science graduate student and Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, working on how we can build better foundation models for biomedicine.

Bio

I grew up in Watertown, TN and obtained my Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) in May 2022 with majors in computer science and mathematics and a minor in statistics. During my time at UTK, I worked with several great mentors, including Christopher Strickland, the Vasileios Maroulas, the Kostas Vogiatzis, and the Scott Emrich. I am a recipient of the 2021 Barry Goldwater Scholarship and an alumnus of the Summer Institute of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.

Before starting my Ph.D., I worked for two years as a research associate under the guidance of Marinka Zitnik. During my time at HMS, I worked on several impactful projects like GraphXAI, TimeX, and PrISMA (coming soon!).

Research Interests

I am interested on building powerful and practical AI for scientific applications. First, my interests are in studying and enabling emergent properties in AI systems for scientific applications. This work involves training general foundation models that can perform task and data transfer across domains and under distribution shifts. Second, I want to build AI systems that can practically interact with scientists, increasing transparency and interpretability of complex reasoning systems used by AI systems to present new hypotheses. I strive to tackle the most challenging problems through the application of my work, including in biomedicine, such as drug discovery and personalized medicine, as well as in sustainability and climate science, such as climate forecasting and advanced materials development.