Research
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Dates: Summer 2026
Mentor:
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University of Michigan
Dates: January 2026 — Present
Faculty Mentor:
Industry Mentors:
This year-long program is a collaboration between University of Michigan student researchers and
Walbridge, a Detroit-based construction company specializing in
large-scale industrial and manufacturing projects. My team and I work directly with the technology leaders at Walbridge to build
an AI chat service using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) on their sensitive project documents.
I work on answer verification, data cleaning, and agent architecture. Most of our
solutions involve a combination of MS Copilot Studio, Power Automate workflows, and a data maintenance service, like SharePoint, Dataverse,
or Excel depending on the application.
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Dates: Summer 2024
Mentors:
The objective of this project was to investigate the performance differences between heuristic programming methods and
RL methods in vehicle traffic simulations. We were specifically interested in designing simulations that involved a 'priority' vehicle, e.g.,
a police car or ambulance, as it maneuvered through an environment of autonomous vehicles. We imagined a vehicle-to-vehicle scenario where the priority
car could communicate its presence to the network of autonomous vehicles, prompting them to enter a 'safe-driving' mode to avoid
obstructing the priority car. This safe-driving mode featured a sequence of actions such as slowing down, pulling to the side, or clearing a path,
which were either heuristic or RL based.
All simulations were created using the open-source traffic simulation platform SUMO and
controlled via the TraCI MATLAB API.
Source code available at
https://github.com/token-cubed/UTK-ML-Research
Conference poster — click to enlarge.
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Fisk University
Group: NSF—CREST (BioSS program)
Dates: Summer 2023
Mentors:
This NSF-funded internship was a deep dive into protein purification and crystallization (and my first introduction to academic research).
I was the lone CS student in a group of mostly biochemists.
Over the course
of the summer, I carried out many of the major steps of the protein purification and crystallization process, including:
- Transformation — introducing non-native DNA into bacterial cells in the form of engineered plasmids. These plasmids code for the genes that express the protein of interest.
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Bacterial culture growth — using one of my favorite machines: the 'shaker' to grow bacterial cultures that contain our protein of interest.
- Affinity chromatography — gradually washing away unwanted proteins, eventually leaving us with a highly pure solution.
- Gel electrophoresis — a method for determining the molecular weight of the molecules in our solution, which can inform us as to whether our purification attempts were successful.
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Crystal growth — pictures are better than words here.
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