CV

Graduate Researcher

INVITE Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Advised by Dr. H Chad Lane.

• Leading the development of an AI teaching assistant that helps teachers explore classroom data through conversation.
• Selected for the AIVO AI4Ed Summer Fellowship Program 2026, a Google.org-funded cross-institute AI in Education research initiative.

Graduate Mentor and Researcher

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Advised by Dr. Volodymyr Kindratenko.

• Mentored undergraduates on ML research projects (REU FoDOMMaT).
• Taught a PyTorch-focused deep learning bootcamp covering model training, evaluation, and ethics.
• Developed an LLM-based safety classification system to detect unsafe prompts on UIUC.chat, a tutoring platform serving UIUC students.

Undergraduate Researcher (REU FoDOMMaT)

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Advised by Dr. Chenhui Shao and Dr. Seid Koric.

• Adapted pretrained image classification models for real-time quality prediction in ultrasonic welding.

Undergraduate Researcher

Cyber Innovations Lab, University of Southern Mississippi

Advised by Dr. Nick Rahimi.

• Published two papers on ML-based cybersecurity, focusing on SMS malware classification and adversarial attack detection in darknet traffic.
• Completed undergraduate thesis developing and fine-tuning an LSTM on historical text, investigating preprocessing methods that reduced training time while maintaining output quality.

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Computer Science

• Advised by Dr. H Chad Lane.

Bachelor of Science

University of Southern Mississippi

Computer Science

• Summa Cum Laude, Honors College

Adversarial Attack Optimization and Evaluation for Machine Learning-based Dark Web Traffic Analysis

33rd International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE)

Pages 3–13. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-75201-8_1

SMS Malware Detection: A Machine Learning Approach

2022 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)

Pages 937–942. DOI: 10.1109/CSCI58124.2022.00167

AIVO AI4Ed Summer Fellowship

AIVO Institute

Fiddler Innovation Graduate Student Fellowship Award

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Honors College Discovery Scholar Research Grant

University of Southern Mississippi