A software engineer and educator pursuing doctoral research

I'm a software engineer by training and practice, and an educator by current role, and I'm looking to bring both into a PhD. Teaching has shown me, in a way that shipping code alone never did, how people actually learn, adopt, and get stuck on the systems we build, and that gap between what we design and how people really use it is the question I want to study formally.

I hold an M.S. in Computer Science from Clark University (2023, GPA 3.97/4.00, Alpha Epsilon Lambda Honor Society) and a B.E. in Computer Science from Dr. Ambedkar Institute of Technology (2019). Most of my career has been hands-on software and web development: building GIS-based infrastructure management, COVID-19 monitoring, and disaster-risk assessment systems in Laravel, OpenLayers, GeoServer, and PostgreSQL for a national telecom regulator and public health partners.

At Clark University, I also contributed research tooling to a published study of hate group videos on YouTube (ACM CSCW'22), and more recently co-authored applied machine learning research spanning public health and clinical AI. I currently work as an Education Coordinator at the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester, teaching programming, web development, and computational thinking to youth, work that has taught me as much about how people learn as any of my formal training did.

That combination, production software engineering, applied research tooling (Python, Selenium, OpenCV, XGBoost), and years spent watching beginners learn to build things, is what I want to bring to doctoral research at the intersection of software systems and human behavior.