Thanks for visiting my personal site!

As of 2025, I am pursuing my PhD in Statistics at Columbia University.

My research focuses on scalable spatiotemporal modeling of large-scale neural recordings. Bayesian methods, for the most part, are computationally infeasible and require approximation to work. You can’t get around approximation, but you can make the uncertainty quantification more meaningful. We’re currently analyzing over two orders of magnitude more neurons than the SOTA Bayesian methods! See here for an abstract on this project that is currently in the submission process.

I am originally from Durham, North Carolina. I studied Mathematics (B.A.) and Statistics (B.S.) at UNC-Chapel Hill. I began research in computer vision building autonomous vehicles during undergrad and I’ve been working in the field of AI ever since.

In 2021, I moved to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University to complete my master’s in Computational Science, where I started my research in computational neuroscience.

My research in Allston blended natural and artificial intelligence, informing computer vision tasks with inspiration from the primary visual cortex. Thank you to the wonderful CRISP group for an enlightening and productive two years. See my Scholar page for more details and ongoing work.

In 2024, I moved to Manhattan to continue threads of my work on neural data analysis.

My work is heavily computational in nature. I like getting inside the GPU and thinking about how memory moves. I believe that scalability is the biggest predominating factor for most algorithm classes today.

Personal

To the detriment of my wallet, I have been going deep down the photography rabbithole (I think a drug habit would’ve been more economically viable). I post some of my favorites on Flickr.

If you’re on X you can follow me here.

Many people don’t know that famous documentarian Ken Burns made a series about my life.

I also have some older garbage on Youtube and Substack. I just want to make cool stuff.

“Low Tech News Feed”

UPDATE (01/25): My first semester at Columbia is complete! What a whirlwind. Looking forward to connecting with more folks this year in the city as I’m now finally more settled in.

UPDATE (6/24): I am back in Upper West Side, and I brought THE WOO back with me.

UPDATE (9/23): I have actually deferred my enrollment at Columbia until next Fall to work on my research and programming projects. However, I will be continuing research with John Cunningham in the meantime. Please continue to reach out for collaborations, academic or non-academic, until I come back to New York next summer!

UPDATE (6/23): I moved to Columbia’s Statistics department to work on my PhD. I have added reflections on my time at Harvard in the essays section. Thanks to all of the folks who made my time in Boston possible, especially: my mom and dad, as well as my grandpa Wile; IACS peers and friends, especially Bill Zhai, Vitoria Lima, Emilia Mazzolenis, and Albert Ge; members of the CRISP lab and Shubham Choudhary, who will soon be kicked out for his heinous criminal activity; the OG DURM Squad including Fat Kat Richard, “Da Nang” Dale David, and Jimbo Jambs; Matt Damon for calling me “Tiny Tim” at the Good Will Hunting Bench; the amazing Maria Stavros Shevory for being the best physical therapist on the planet.