Currently

• I graduated from MIT in June 2023. I’m working as a software engineer at a generative 3D startup in San Francisco.

Previously

• I finished my first marathon in Athens, Greece in November. My time was 4:51:16. A friend spontaneously convinced me to sign up in early July. Before then, I’ve never competitively ran more than a 5k. Check out this vlog my friend made about our marathon!
• Together with a team of 9, I won first overall at NASA RASC-AL’s 2022 Design Competition. Here’s our paper we presented at ASCEND 2022 and are currently publishing. The theme we chose was “Mars Water-Based ISRU Architecture” and the goal was to design an architecture to supply 50 tons of propellant in 5 years. I’m interested in space infrastructure, and one of my dreams is to build a city in space.
• I created and managed teams at HackMIT. I spearheaded the development and release of our first mobile app and maintained our in-house project submission platform.
• Email me 📩 to learn more about my work!

Interests

What good is science if we don’t know how to use it to improve the human experience? I love the humanities, and though I am not an expert in many of these fields, I enjoy learning about abstract expressionism, classical Chinese literature, and film theory.

• Space
  Space reminds me that there are worlds greater than mine and that of humanity. I first became enamored by it as a child after receiving nonfiction books from my parents on stars and planets. After reading The Three-Body Problem, I decided that humanity’s future lies in the stars and I want to build it.
• 8051/as31
  Assembly is cool. Having nanosecond control over your code and knowing exactly what’s on the stack is so powerful.
• Reading
  I was a voracious reader much before I was a science nerd. I actually read everything: classics, history, memoirs, economic development, historical fiction, science fiction, and poetry. Check out what I’ve read and some of my favorites.
• History
  If reading was my first love, history was my second. Growing up, I was a classical and tactical history geek. After I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, I became more fascinated with why and how things happened as opposed to what happened. Recently however, I’ve learned to always question what happened as well. I’m also interested in classical China, specifically the role of women throughout the dynasties and cross-cultural exchange prior to the Song.

For fun

I like to read, bake, hike, and plan trips (18 countries and counting). My favorite landscapes (and hikes) are alpine mountains with moraine lakes. The most beautiful places I’ve visited are Banff, Alberta, Canada and Gornergrat, Switzerland.

Occasionally I watch film. My favorite movie is Burning, and I like short stories and films that make me question what I see on screen (arthouse, post-modernism).

I don’t consume mass media. I’m not on TikTok, Youtube, Twitch, Discord, BeReal, etc. I don’t have any streaming subscriptions, and the only TV I watch is sports – specifically the NFL, NBA, NCAA, and tennis. For news, I subscribe to The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

Favorites

Books

I primarily read classics, sci-fi, history, and the political economy, in that order. Recently I’ve become fascinated on the economic and political development of China, the origins of language, and why nations fail.

Here is my love letter to literature. Links in the list below are reviews or thoughts I’ve written on the book.

• Cien años de soledad
• East of Eden
• Count of Monte Cristo
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
• Anna Karenina
• Madame Bovary
• Late Victorian holocausts: El Niño famines and the making of the Third World
• Why Nations Fail
• The Banished Immortal: A life of Li Bai
• Kafka on the Shore
• The Forever War
• The Three Body Problem trilogy
• Minor Feelings
• Looking for Alaska
• The Glass Castle
• A Thousand Splendid Suns
• Pachinko
• All the Light We Cannot See
• Love in a Fallen City
• Midnight’s Children
• Dandelion Dynasty series
• My Name is Red
  
  

Poems

• Romance sonámbulo
• Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada
  • Poema VII
  • Poema XX
• 虞美人
  
  

Quotes

In no particular order.

“Quit Your Job”, Wolf Tivy To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
I loved you, so I drew these tides of
Men into my hands
And wrote my will across the
Sky and stars.

Why Literature?, Mario Vargas Llosa
But literature has been, and will continue to be, as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human experience through which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances. It has enabled individuals, in all the particularities of their lives, to transcend history: as readers of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy, we understand each other across space and time, and we feel ourselves to be members of the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we learn what we share as human beings, what remains common in all of us under the broad range of differences that separate us.

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
Memories warm you up from the inside but they also tear you apart.