Hello,

I am a PhD candidate at the Neuroengineering Laboratory at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. My research focuses on reverse engineering how animals generate movement and translating these principles into controllers for embodied AI. Specifically, I build integrated brain–body models of the common fruit fly, whose nervous system has recently been mapped in full. Through these models, I seek to both advance our understanding of biological neural computation and discover more efficient neural architecture for robots.

From 2017 to 2021, I was an ecosystem modeler. I worked as Chief Research Officer at HabiTerre, a startup focused on ecosystem modeling and sustainability benchmarking from 2019 to 2021. There, I led an NSF-funded SBIR project to quantify farmland resilience by simulating counterfactual scenarios using generative modeling. I was also awarded a USDA grant to develop more efficient irrigation scheduling algorithms informed by current satellite observations. I continue to help manage Habiterre’s patent portfolio.

From 2017 to 2019, I began my scientific career in astronomy. I helped develop models to detect gravitational waves and estimate their parameters as a part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration. I also built machine learning models to curate data for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). See my publications for details.