The Builder Awakens

Started as a Programmer Analyst at Cognizant, building automated mobile testing solutions with OpenCV. First taste of making machines see and decide.

Watson & The Research Lab

Joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab. Embedded cognitive computing and NLP into Watson solutions. Trained custom NLP models before "LLM" was a buzzword.

VR, Browsers & a Master's Degree

MS at Rice University. Research Assistant parallelizing JavaScript for VR headsets at Mozilla Research. Optimized WebGL and Three.js for wearable VR. Earned a Mozilla Research Fellowship.

Patents at IBM Almaden

Two summer internships at IBM Almaden Research Center. Invented a multi-factor authentication system using biometrics + blockchain — awarded US Patent US11025643B2. Built tamper-evident systems with ARM TrustZone.

The Startup Life

Machine Learning Lead at Fireflies.ai — built the on-premise ASR engine used by 10M+ users. Then Senior Engineer at Clearedin, designing phishing detection and URL scanning pipelines.

The PhD Quest: Teaching AI to Reason

PhD at University of Houston, advised by Prof. Weidong Shi. Dissertation: "Teaching AIs to Reason and Code, Confidentially." Won the Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award and UH Best Dissertation Award.

40+ publications (41 published, 28 first-author). 4x research grants. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. Best Dissertation Award. Google Cloud Research Innovator. NeurIPS 2026.

PayPal: Production AI at Scale

Staff Agentic AI Researcher at PayPal Research (San Jose). Lead technical strategy for production-scale agentic AI: built a voice-to-voice model with NVIDIA and a frontier multimodal model with Google (lead author on both), invented the CM-DPO preference-optimization framework, and train frontier LLMs up to 120B parameters. Designed a multi-agent adversarial evaluation arena; filed 3 U.S. patents.