About Me

This page is an attempt to realize my personhood to you, dear reader, by sharing things about myself that will (through my tastes and interests) hopefully provision your perception of me with a dimension that isn't adjacent to, say, B2B MERN SaaS. I'm a real person, not just a list of work experiences!

A Brief History

I was fortunate enough to be able to grow up without having to confront the future I wanted until I entered highschool. When I started to think about my future, about the impact I wanted to have on the world, I realized that the most reasonable thing to do would be to try to improve the wellbeing of as many people as possible. I loved the natural sciences (physics was king for me, followed closely behind by chemistry, then biology), and wanted to use my passion in those fields in my career. I was also introduced to computer science as a highschool freshman, and fell in love with it immediately. I saw computer science as the ultimate form of play: anything I wanted to do, anything I could conceptualize, I could implement. I grew to love computer science for the sake of it, as an art form. I didn't know how I'd feel about medical school, however (a decade of higher learning can be daunting to a teenager, even if they love science), and I wanted to be able to help people faster and in a more widespread way. With this in mind, it seemed natural to get a degree in biomedical engineering — I could help create things that would help not one person at a time, but many.

I was very lucky to be surrounded by extremely interesting, intelligent, and caring people, and those people have helped me throughout my undergraduate degree as well. I've spent the last five years in a whirlwind of education supplied by some of the most passionate and erudite people I have ever met. I have worked on things I never could've dreamed of (especially during my capstone), have become several different people over the course of the half-decade, and have left that period of my life with my desire to help others even stronger. At this stage in my life, I'm young and unbearably excited for what the future holds. We live in terrifying, uncertain times, but I believe that the grand moral arc of the universe (if there is one) does in fact bend towards justice. I can't wait to see where we go.

Interests

I have several hobbies that I love sharing with others. I'm a lover of Blender, a FOSS 3D modeling/animation software. I find making things in Blender to be a fantastic creative outlet. Here's a sample piece I did in an hour or so a while back (based on artwork from @veryluckyclover):

I'm also a huge music fan. There has rarely been a genre that I've listened to and not found something to appreciate: I love rock (The Strokes are my favourite band of all time), rap (there's something to love in every decade of the genre but I've been listening to a lot of Mac Miller again), pop (Imaginal Disk is such an incredible album), R&B (D'Angelo and Lauryn Hill especially), indie (this is extremely hard to define as a genre but you'll usually find something that matches whatever your definition is in my current monthly playlist -- usually Mitski's in there. I've also been listening to a lot of MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee, and Cameron Winter), folk (Bob Dylan and Joan Baez are incredible together and apart), pop punk (Paramore first and foremost!), emo (My Chemical Romance — the first time I heard The Ghost of You I had to play it back 4 times in a row), electronic (think Daft Punk, think Aphex Twin, think Sweet Trip), hardcore (Knocked Loose blew me away the first time I heard them as a teenager), and a bunch of other genres that I'm forgetting to list.

Anyways, here's what I've been listening to lately, as well as my current playlist (I've been making a new one every month for the last few years as a sort of aural diary — whenever I listen to an older playlist, I find myself instantly transported back to the place and headspace I was in when I made it. Who says time travel isn't possible?):

Let's talk books.

The Goodreads API got shut down a number of years back, and StoryGraph doesn't plan on creating one any time soon, so I have to remember to manually update this. The last time I remembered to update this was February 26th, 2026.

I'm currently ~46% of the way through Another Country by James Baldwin, and I love it so far. It's heartbreaking, it's beautiful, the characters are incredibly rich. The exploration of the crushing force of oppression, of being trapped under your marginalized identity (especially trying to ignore it where you can in the case of Vivaldo and failing in the case of Rufus) is masterfully done and still extremely relevant. I'm also fascinated by the reactions of the characters to Rufus' suicide, and the pity and understanding some of the characters (particularly Cass) give him after the fact. I wonder how forgiving we (that is, the average person) would be today (especially in light of his abuse of Leona that drives her to insanity), if we would afford the same grace to him, or if our reactions would be different.

Baldwin has a way of singing through his word choice such that you get sucked in, it's hypnotic, you find yourself enjoying a sentence so much that you don't want to leave it behind. At the same time, you really have no choice but to continue reading. Not finished yet, but highly recommend.

Another work I love is the poem/essay Say Translation Is Art by Sawako Nakayasu. If nothing else, it's provided me with an extensive reading list about concepts that I am largely uneducated on as of right now.

Finally, I also want to get better at writing (one of my favourite courses in university was Creative Writing), and hopefully share some work one day (I don't dare to fantasize of having an extensive, world-shaking corpus, but a few essays, poems, and stories here and there would be nice).

If you've made it this far, please reach out!