CV

Education

• B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, 2024

Research Experience

• Sarcasm-Enhanced Hate Speech Detection April 2024 – Present
  • Explored whether sarcasm can serve as a proxy for covert hate speech to improve the detection of indirect and rhetorically complex abusive language online. • Employed sarcasm pretraining and sequential transfer learning to improve model performance, achieving 71% precision and 88% recall.
  • Established sarcasm pretraining as a performance-enhancing strategy, improving hate speech detection by 7% across all metrics, including precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC.
• Monitoring Productivity in the Workplace January 2024 – March 2024
  • Performed statistical tests on physiological and survey data to analyze feature variability in stress, mood, and productivity across work environments.
  • Built and optimized a random forest classifier for self-reported attributes using mean imputation, z-score normalization, and hyperparameter tuning with cross-validation.
• Leaf Rust Detection on Low-Resolution Images August 2023 – July 2023
  • Investigated performance limitations of disease detection models on low-resolution imagery common in field applications, focusing specifically on coffee leaf rust.
  • Enhanced lesion contrast through high-pass filtering to improve model learnability.
  • Designed and trained CNNs for early coffee rust detection, achieving 94% precision and recall.
• Wearable Bio-Sensing for Family Well-Being January 2022 – December 2023
  • Engineered preprocessing scripts to convert biometric data from wearable devices into datasets with daily metrics, such as sleep analysis, for each participant across 14 families.
  • Applied audio transformers to extract event tags (e.g., yelling, crying) from recordings, creating detailed histograms of speech patterns to help identify inter-family dynamics.

Professional Experience

• Technology Policy Fellow, Paragon Policy Fellowship May 2025 – Present • Designing a data literacy assessment for Tempe, Arizona’s workforce, including evaluation criteria, outreach strategy, and policy recommendations based on stakeholder engagement. • Collaborated on a policy memo evaluating digital voting legislation in Arizona and recommending a phased rollout in Maricopa County.
• Software Engineering Intern, Microsoft & Cyborg Mobile — IC3 (M365 Substrate) May 2024 – August 2024
  • Developed a C# console application to host and migrate Microsoft Teams performance testing services from Azure Classic Cloud to Kubernetes following its deprecation.
  • Containerized testing services with Docker, deployed to Kubernetes using YAML, and automated XML-based performance tests via Azure Pipelines.
• Software Engineering Intern, Microsoft & Cyborg Mobile — E+D (M365 Substrate) May 2023 – August 2023
  • Developed a data extraction, analysis, and storage pipeline using LLMs, KQL, and cloud databases to summarize incident reports, identify patterns, and generate visuals.
  • Applied language transformers to match predicted patterns, achieving 90% accuracy in predictions and 73% precision in similarity matching.
• Break Through Tech AI Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles — Verizon Team (Finalist) June 2022 – April 2023
  • Compiled a dataset and trained an object detection model to classify smartphones by brand and color for inventory tracking, achieving 96% confidence and 98% precision.
  • Collaborated with Verizon data scientists to design a color-sorting method using bounding boxes, RGB histograms, and Euclidean distance to distinguish 800+ color variations.
• New Technologist Intern, Microsoft & Cyborg Mobile June 2022 – August 2022
  • Developed a real-time climate and emergency resource web app using React JS, integrating weather and air quality APIs to generate forecasts and provide health-based alerts.
  • Built an MVP allowing users to register health conditions and receive warnings for unsafe air quality or extreme weather, using map APIs to direct them to nearby safety shelters.

Awards & Honors

• Albert Dorman Future Leader Award, USC 2024
  Awarded to top graduating Viterbi seniors for academic excellence and leadership potential.
• Grand Challenges Scholar, National Academy of Engineering 2024
  Recognized for interdisciplinary engagement across the five NAE Grand Challenge Mindsets.
• Honorable Mention, National Center for Women & IT ($2,500) 2024
  One of twelve undergraduate and graduate women recognized for impactful computing research.
• Research Scholar, USC Ming Hsieh Institute ($1,000) 2023 - 2024
  Awarded to five undergraduates in the department for exceptional contributions to research.
• Finalist, National Center for Women & IT 2023
  Recognized as one of 47 undergraduate and graduate women for computing innovation.
• College Match Finalist, Questbridge 2020
  National program for high-achieving, low-income students earning full-ride scholarships.

Professional Development

• Graduate School Mentorship Initiative, Científico Latino 2024
• Computer Science Research Mentorship Program, Google 2023
• Latinx Student Leadership Summit, Google 2022
• Fellow, America Needs You 2021 - 2022