A bit more about me

Misc personal info

• I am from Toronto Canada.
• I was a lifeguard/swim instructor for 2 years in high school.
• Like baking cakes/muffins/cookies (but don't do it very much nowadays because these foods are very unhealthy 🙁).
• On another page I describe some of my beliefs.

How did I get into the field I am in now?

At first I thought I wanted to be a chemical engineer... and then I realized that chemical engineers just move fluids through pipes and occasionally heat the pipes (sorry chemical engineers). Then I transferred into a program called nanotechnology engineering, which I found very interesting. This program taught me that:

1. Chemistry, and nanochemistry in particular, is extremely challenging, and still not well-understood from a theoretical perspective, owing largely to the difficulty of modeling these systems.
2. Experimental work is not for me (I am too clumsy and don't enjoy it).

Motivated by this, I transitioned into doing more programming. After getting some experience in the software industry (to learn best practices for coding and development), I applied to PhDs in materials science and machine learning. I was motivated to use algorithms to design better experiments, ultimately saving a lot of time and money in the wet lab. This led me to work on Bayesian optimization, which seemed to be the most natural type of algorithm for this setting.