Research
Computational materials, AI safety evaluation, and CBRN risk. This page grows with the PhD.
Active & Incoming
Current research directions and affiliations.
Computational Chemical Engineering
IncomingUC Davis PhD — incoming Fall 2026
Computational modeling of materials with an emphasis on dental materials — simulating mechanical behavior, degradation, and interfacial chemistry at the molecular scale. Builds on prior UCSB lab work in nanofluidics.
AI Safety & Misuse Prevention
ActiveReinforce Labs · OpenAI · xAI
Developing evaluation frameworks for frontier models to assess scientific misuse potential. Focused on whether models can provide meaningful uplift for weapons-relevant knowledge — adversarial red-teaming at the model capability boundary.
CBRN Risk in AI Systems
ActiveReinforce Labs · xAI
Chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear risk evaluation in large language models. Building taxonomies of threat-relevant knowledge and assessing model behavior under adversarial prompting strategies.
Adversarial Model Evaluation
ActiveOpenAI · xAI · Handshake AI
Designing PhD-level scientific prompts that expose failure modes in chain-of-thought reasoning across chemistry, biology, and materials science. Benchmark and rubric development for STEM-domain model evaluation.
Past Work
Undergraduate and pre-PhD research experience.
Nanofluidics & Molecular Separation
2016 – 2020Pennathur Nanolab, UC Santa Barbara
Undergraduate research in nanofluidic devices — studying electrokinetic transport, ion selectivity, and molecular separation at sub-100nm length scales.
GMP/GDP & Pharmaceutical Process Chemistry
2019Harvard / Amgen Scholars Program
Completed at Amgen. Good Manufacturing Practice, pharmaceutical process chemistry, medical device regulatory frameworks, and chemical hygiene in industrial settings.
Publications
Papers, preprints, and conference proceedings.
In progress · updating as PhD begins