Student life

The UCI buses carry “now hiring” signs which read: “Guarantee your seat on the bus!” While that argument might not hold up too well when it comes to getting around by bus, I think it does hold quite true for what I do. There are two main motivations for my student-facing work:

1. I believe my involvement strengthens our ability to execute and expand our mandate.
2. I can “guarantee my seat on the bus” as a shared benefactor of said mission.

So how’s that been going?

• ICS Student Council:
  • Academic and Alumni Affairs Committee:
    • In winter 2025, I wrote the curriculum for our novel LeetCode Study Groups initiative. >140 people met weekly in small groups to discuss a written lecture and problem set written by me. Topics included dynamic programming, directed and undirected graph theory, and prefix sums.
    • I’ve also presided over one faculty panel and one alumni panel, moderating discussions about life at and outside UCI.
  • Projects Committee: I work on Anteater API, our API serving UCI data such as current course offerings, historical letter grades, and enrollment trends. Every time course enrollment rolls around, about 40k visitors consume our data via our club’s schedule and >degree planner. This adds up to 500k requests daily. I built the code serving study room availability and degree requirements. I also work on code review, fix bugs, and rewrote the external-facing documentation. Currently working on getting more fine-tuned data on course enrollment trends.

Research

My interests revolve around genomics, bioengineering, algorithms, and ML.

Summer 2025 research coming soon

Stay tuned!

Thornton Lab @UCI, ‘24-

Calculation of population genetics statistics from individual-level genotypes and tree sequence encoded ancestral recombination graphs in Rust. For an example of such a statistic, Wikipedia on Tajima’s $D$. We’ve achieved a >10x speedup in statistic computation over scikit-allel, a C-accelerated Python library with similar faculties. We continue to work on improving performance, particularly while reading input data.

We presented at the 2025 Undergraduate Research Symposium at UCI; see the poster here. Our participation at this symposium was funded by the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.

Aguilar Lab @CSULA, ‘23-‘24

We’ve assembled the first reference genome of Paralabrax maculatofasciatus (the spotted sand bass). I demonstrated that this new genome has strong syntenic alignment with Centropristis striata (black sea bass). Our new genome and paper ought to be published in Journal of Heredity and on GenBank once the NIH stops dealing with budget cuts.

SEAL @Caltech, ‘24

(poster, paper) DNA barcoding of Monomorium minimum (little black ant) environmental sample

I wrote up the paper and poster and was largely responsible for directing and executing the project.

At a high level, we got distracted while trying to figure out what was in a microbial fuel cell and accidentally discovered a way to characterize plants growing near the habitat of an ant we found on campus. We had an Illumina MiSeq, BLAST, and Jupyter, and evidently that was enough.