GLASS /
Four countries. Three years of research, leadership, and service. One constant: using rigorous tools to address real human problems, and building community wherever I go.
Semester abroad at NYU Abu Dhabi. Computational Physics opened the door to simulation-driven research and changed my technical direction. Witnessing the UAE's 50-year transformation from desert to global metropolis was a live study in SDG 11.
Built a digital twin of Hanoi's traffic flow to model emission reduction, tied to UN SDG 11. Vietnam sees roughly 70,000 pollution-related deaths per year. This was the first time I saw math address a problem that size.
Studied UN SDGs and basic Korean at Hanyang University. Field visits to Hisbeans (disability-inclusive hiring), MYSC (impact incubator), and Donghwa made social entrepreneurship concrete. Language learning added humility to how I understand culture.
Manage a team of 11 to serve NYU Tandon's Muslim community. Organize professional panels, speaker events, and city-wide collaborations. Spearheaded Charity Week fundraising and grew into this role over three semesters on the executive board.
Marched with the Boston Crusaders, a nationally competitive drum corps. Toured North America and taught musicianship to students of all ages. The precision and ensemble thinking carry directly into how I approach research and collaboration.
Designed and built an Arduino-powered interactive mural for elementary school students. Bridging physical art and computation is the same instinct I bring to research: making hard ideas feel accessible.
Analyzed 20,000+ monthly user entries across 5,700+ users at a healthcare job platform. Built dashboards in Hex using Pandas and SQL, expanded reporting from 2 to 6 dashboards, and identified demographic patterns in the matching algorithm to support equity in healthcare hiring.
Attended the national SASE convention in Boston. Networked with aerospace engineers, construction firms, and research labs. Practiced my elevator pitch, interviewed on-site, and left with an internship offer.
Raised worldwide for schools, medical aid, and orphan support
Co-organized a week of fundraising events at NYU Tandon: gala, auction, trivia night, sports day, gaming night. Hosted the Charity Week team for end-of-year reflections. Funds directed to urgent aid for children and displaced communities through Charity Week International. NYU placed among the top-raising institutions worldwide.
Built a quantum routing solution for last-mile logistics as part of NYU's quantum hackathon. Classical routing is intractable at scale; the quantum approach cut route complexity and truck emissions. Preceded by a 2-week intensive and two Qiskit certificates.
Research assistantship at NYUAD's Astroparticle Physics Lab, working toward detecting axions, a dark matter candidate comprising roughly 80% of the universe's matter. Designed a detection model 'Haloscope' to detect a dark matter particle called Axions.
Designing the magnetic coils that confine plasma in a stellarator fusion device is one of the most computationally challenging problems in clean energy research. Stellarators use complex, three-dimensional magnetic fields generated by external coils to hold superheated plasma in place long enough for fusion reactions to occur. Unlike simpler fusion devices, the coils must be shaped with extraordinary precision, but most mathematically valid solutions are physically impossible to build. This research investigates new computational methods that make the coil design process faster, more reliable, and more practical for real-world engineering.
Two key contributions are presented. First, an Augmented Lagrangian optimization approach is applied to coil design, which automatically balances physics goals against engineering constraints such as coil curvature, spacing, and structural forces, without requiring tedious manual tuning. This method was tested across five different stellarator configurations and consistently produced buildable coil designs that outperformed previous results, at a fraction of the computational cost. Second, a technique called Exponential Spectral Scaling (ESS) is introduced to address a numerical problem in plasma shape optimization, where certain mathematical parameters differ from others by millions of times in magnitude. ESS rescales these parameters in a way that dramatically improves the optimization process, achieving up to five times faster convergence. Together, these methods represent meaningful progress toward making stellarator design tractable for practical fusion reactor development.
Read the paper →What drives the work
Across fusion reactors, quantum optics labs, Hanoi traffic grids, and communities in Brooklyn: rigorous tools, human problems.