My Story

I was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. I attended Onondaga Central High School, where I was a two-sport varsity athlete, competing in both track & field and cross country. I graduated valedictorian of my high school class in June 2017. I then moved south (well, technically, albeit less than 50 miles from my home) to Ithaca, New York to attend Cornell University's College of Engineering.

I entered Cornell intending to study chemical engineering (ChemE). After taking my first university-level chemistry course during my freshman fall and working as a lab assistant in a chemical engineering lab during my freshman spring, I became disenchanted with the idea of continuing down the ChemE path. During my freshman spring, I took my first computer science (CS) course -- CS 1110, introductory Python programming. It was this course, and the inspirational teaching of Professor Anne Bracy, that helped me to discover my passion for computer science, which ultimately led me to switch my major to CS.

The summer after my freshman year, I was incredibly fortunate to be accepted into an REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program at Syracuse University's Biomaterials Institute. I was placed in the same research group I had worked with previously during a research internship I participated in during the summer after my junior year of high school. The work I did during that high school internship involved synthesizing and characterizing a new type of polymer, known as a quadruple shape memory polymer (Q-SMP). This work was eventually published in the peer-reviewed journal ChemPhysChem in 2018. You can find that paper linked here.

Instead of continuing to do work in polymer chemistry during my REU, I wanted to gain some experience in computer science. Hence, I asked my principal investigator, Dr. James Henderson, if there were any projects I could work on that were more computationally-focused. Thankfully, he did have such a project. I was tasked with advancing existing computer vision software for cell tracking, known as ACTIVE (Automated Contour-based Tracking for In Vitro Environments). I remained involved with this project even after the REU program and was later given the opportunity to present our research at the 2019 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference in Philadelphia.

The summer after my sophomore year, I interned as a software engineer at SRC Inc -- a government defense contractor -- working in the realms of DevOps, full-stack web development, and interpreter development. The experienced I gained at SRC that summer springboarded me into my junior year software engineering internship with Microsoft, wherein I worked on security for Windows operating systems.

Throughout my undergraduate career as a CS major, I took a myriad of fascinating courses, including courses in distributed systems, cloud computing, machine learning, programming languages, artificial intelligence, and data science. I also became interested in economics during undergrad, taking courses in microeconomic theory, econometrics, and environmental economics. I was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, serving on the executive board for three semesters. In 2019, I was the Vice President for Communications of Cornell's Interfraternity Council (IFC). Additionally, I served as a teaching assistant for four different courses (and numerous incredible professors):
I have since returned to Microsoft to begin my professional career as a software engineer, working on the same team I interned with during my junior year: the Platform Integrity (PI) team within the Azure Edge and Platform (AEP) organization. I am currently working remote from New York City.