Hello! I am a first-year PhD student under Dr. Boris Kramer in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego.

I am broadly interested in computational methods for understanding and predicting diverse fluid flows, including methods for modeling, data analysis, and Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) of systems ranging from liquid-propelled rockets to the space weather-driving solar atmosphere. In particular, I’m excited to work on data-driven Reduced-Order Models (ROMs) and inverse problems for such systems in future research.

I took interest in these areas during my undergraduate in aerospace engineering at Cal Poly Pomona, where I was lucky enough to intern with NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), as well as take part in a university rocketry project.

During my three-year remote internship with the NASA Goddard Solar Physics Laboratory, I worked under Dr. Nick Arge, Dr. Michael Kirk, and Dr. Daniel da Silva on (i) computational data analysis research for boundary detection with UQ of low density regions in the Sun’s atmosphere, known as coronal holes, using multi-spectral imagery, (ii) simulation analysis and visualization software development for the WSA ensemble model of the corona, and (iii) development of the WSA Dashboard, a visualization website for the WSA model. I was also granted a leadership role as lead intern for the NASA Heliophysics Division.

During my one-year remote internship with the NCAR High Altitude Observatory, I worked under Dr. Mike Wiltberger and Dr. Nick Gross on visualization software development for the MAS and GAMERA magnetohydrodynamic (mag…ic for short…) models of the corona, solar wind, and Earth’s magnetosphere.

During my two-year involvement in the Cal Poly Pomona Liquid Rocket Laboratory, I worked under Dr. Frank Chandler as a student mentor and lead on (i) physics-based surrogate model development for a liquid rocket, including flight dynamics one-way coupled to a time-dependent thermal-fluid network modeling the propulsion system, (ii) application of the model in Monte Carlo simulation-based UQ and open-loop control design for optimal peak altitude in flight, and (iii) statistical data analysis of our (successful!) liquid rocket engine tests.

I’d be glad to learn about your interests, so please feel free to reach out! My email and LinkedIn are under the above Follow button.

Recent News

June 23-27, 2025 I attended the Solar Heliospheric and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) workshop in Charleston, South Carolina, where I presented a poster on our coronal hole detection work and learned about the science and prediction of solar flows, glows, and blow-ups (aka magnetic flux transport/coronal currents/solar wind formation, optically thin radiative transfer, and coronal mass ejection eruptions).

April 26, 2025 I attended the Southern California Applied Mathematics Symposium (SOCAMS) at UC Riverside, where I learned about research ranging from optimization and inverse problem theory to fluid mechanics and biology applications.

April 12, 2025 It was great to be at the Barrio Logan Science and Art Expo with our research group and UC San Diego rocketry project teams, where we hosted space-themed outreach booths and got to see the excitement of so many kids and families.

January 31, 2025 Our paper on Magnetic Field-Constrained Ensemble Image Segmentation of Coronal Holes in Chromospheric Observations has been published in Solar Physics. This work revisits near infrared and magnetic field images of the low solar atmosphere and quantifies uncertainties in detected boundaries to address key challenges in Coronal Hole (CH) detection, which plays a pivotal role in constraining both predictive models for space weather and scientific theories on solar wind formation at CH boundaries.

November 19-20, 2024 I attended the Workshop on Fusion Energy and Pulsed Power here at UC San Diego, where I learned about numerical models for plasmas in nuclear fusion devices and across astrophysics. It’s been incredibly interesting, both in this workshop and through seminars and courses on campus, to learn about the differences between the fusion, astrophysics, and heliophysics communities despite their shared study of plasmas.

October 6-8, 2024 It was a great experience to participate in the NextProf Pathfinder workshop at Georgia Tech, where I was given advice by so many nice students and mentors, learned about the variety of careers in academia, and learned about the even greater variety of winding and rewarding paths towards them.

September 23, 2024 I moved to UC San Diego (only a few hours drive) to pursue a PhD!

September 16-20, 2024 It was a great experience to participate in the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) International Summer School in Boltenhagen, Germany, where I learned about theory, algorithms, and applications of data assimilation, the framework for integrating data and time-dependent models to make the best predictions possible. I presented a poster on how our coronal hole detection work could contribute to a data assimilation framework and I also got to meet many great members of the UC San Diego Chaos, Computation, Analysis and Optimization (CaCAO) group there!

September 9-13, 2024 I attended the Model Reduction and Surrogate Modeling (MORe) conference here at UC San Diego, where I was exposed to the amazing diversity of mathematics, applications, and perspectives throughout the ROM research community.

June 10-14, 2024 It was a great experience to participate in the SHIELD Summer School in Plasma Processes at the Edge of the Solar System at Boston University, where I learned about magnetohydrodynamic theory, deep space measurements of the solar wind’s state, the fundamental processes of turbulence and magnetic reconnection that determine this state, and finally how the microscopic process of charge exchange gives us global imagery of the heliosphere, the shield surrounding our home in space.

May 20-23, 2024 I attended the Space Weather with Quantified Uncertainties (SWQU) User Meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where I learned about data-assimilative numerical models for flows over the solar surface, the structure of the solar atmosphere, and the dynamics of the solar wind.

December 10-15, 2023 I attended the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California (with over 24,000 people in attendance!), where I presented a poster on our coronal hole detection work.