Experience
Since 2014, I have been a Software Engineer at a Cloud/HPC startup. I develop full-stack web applications and backend services, integrate with container orchestration and virtualization platforms, and optimize systems for high-bandwidth and low-latency I/O performance to accelerate and scale workloads such as analytics and machine learning. I strive to ensure that the software I develop is reliable, easy to use, well-documented, and delivered on time.
From 2011 to 2014 I was an Associate Software Engineer at Roberson and Associates, a technology and management consulting company specializing in wireless communications. I contributed to successful projects for large enterprise clients, and worked on developing software for integrating with embedded systems, collecting and storing data, generating interactive visualizations, and producing reports.
From 2010 to 2013 I was a Software Developer for the Office of Corporate Relations at Illinois Institute of Technology. I worked on enhancing a web application for tracking corporate partnerships and contact information to support collaboration and information sharing among users in multiple university departments.
Education
I attended Illinois Institute of Technology as a Camras Scholar and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2013. Exemplifying the Camras Scholars Program's core pillars of Leadership, Research, and Service, I was actively involved on campus and in the community.
I have had a lifelong interest in robotics, starting with making pretend robots out of cardboard as a young child, and then progressing to building and programming actual robots with Lego Mindstorms kits when I was ten years old. In junior high and high school I built robots for science fair projects and entered robotics competitions at a local university. The schools I attended did not have a robotics team, but I began my involvement with the educational robotics organization FIRST by mentoring a nearby middle school team. I continued my passion for robotics as a university student, joining the Illinois Tech Robotics student organization as soon as I arrived on campus. Through Illinois Tech Robotics I became much more involved in FIRST, volunteering at numerous events and serving on event planning committees, as well as mentoring a high school team. I also worked on building and programming robots for collegiate competitions and for robotics demonstrations at campus and community events. For two years I served on the organization's executive board and was the webmaster. Since graduating, I have remained involved in Illinois Tech Robotics as an alumni mentor and have continued volunteering for FIRST so that I can pass on my enthusiasm for robotics and help provide a valuable and exciting hands-on learning experience for students.
In my third year of university, while planning a robotics event on campus, I learned that the sound and lighting student organization, which had the equipment that the event would need, had become defunct. Recognizing that there were many other campus events that would also benefit from student-led sound and lighting production, I worked with university staff, students, and alumni to restart it. In my role as president of the organization, I recruited new members, organized training sessions, planned and budgeted for equipment purchases, and coordinated with other student organizations to provide sound and lighting for their events.
As a research assistant in the Wireless Network and Communications Research Center at Illinois Institute of Technology, I contributed to projects studying radio frequency spectrum occupancy and utilization to identify ways that spectrum can be used more efficiently. The research was based on collecting and analyzing data from spectrum observatories, which recorded signal strength across a wide range of frequencies over time. I worked on setting up and maintaining the spectrum observatory equipment, configuring and managing servers and databases to store the collected data, and developing software tools to analyze and visualize the data. I co-authored three conference papers, "An RF spectrum observatory database based on a Hybrid Storage System", "Global spectrum observatory network setup and initial findings", and "A high-performance tiered storage system for a global spectrum observatory network", and also presented my research at the Argonne National Laboratory undergraduate research symposium.