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Projects

I work where physics, computation and philosophy meet: teaching machines to recover physical laws, designing an experiment for orbit, and asking what intelligence and justice actually require. Status is current as of October 2026.

Research

Equation Discovery with Deep Learning: Recovering the CO2-Temperature Forcing Law from Climate Data

Mentored by Dr. Tesfahiwet Yemane (PhD, University of Oxford) · In editorial revision at the Journal of High School Science

Can a machine rediscover a physical law from raw data alone, and how far should we trust the equation it returns? I tested this on one of climate science's central relationships: how rising atmospheric CO2 drives temperature.

Using geophysical CO2 and temperature records, I ran two equation-discovery methods. PySR evolves candidate equations and scores them on accuracy and simplicity; SINDy selects the sparsest set of terms that explains the data. Unlike neural-network predictions, both return readable equations a physicist can check against theory.

A recovered law is only as good as its stability, so I built a robustness suite: train/test splits, bootstrap confidence intervals, correction for autocorrelation in the time series, and AIC/BIC model selection to penalize needless complexity. The pipeline is packaged as a Python module. Next, I plan to apply it to the neutron-star equation of state using CompOSE nuclear-matter tables (APR, SLy4, DD2).

Space-Resilient, Sustainable Building Materials (SSEP Mission 22)

Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, National Center for Earth and Space Science Education · Funded by St. Petersburg College · Faculty mentor: Dr. Robert Randelman, SPC Physics · Flight selection: December 2026

Permanent settlements beyond Earth will have to be built from local materials, with almost nothing wasted. With a research partner and our physics faculty mentor, I am designing an experiment that asks how microgravity changes the way a sustainable building material forms, compared with an identical sample on Earth.

Mission 22 spans 30 communities across the U.S. and Canada, and each will fly one student experiment. If ours is selected, it launches to the International Space Station on the SSEP Armstrong payload, projected for late spring or summer 2027, and returns for analysis against ground controls. Material details are withheld until selection.

Decentralized Intelligence in Fungal Networks

Independent project · Designed and run in my home mycology lab · Regeneron STS Submission

Intelligence is usually pictured as something a brain does. Fungi have none, yet their mycelial networks forage, reroute and repair. I am testing whether that organization is measurably more than random growth.

I culture blue oyster fungi (Pleurotus ostreatus, "Blue Brat") on agar plates and grain spawn, record how the networks expand, and quantify their structure with information-entropy metrics drawn from Shannon's information theory. The question: does order emerge from purely local rules, as it does in ant colonies and neural tissue?

A companion experiment grows lion's mane and elf cup fungi through maze-insert agar plates to test how physical topology shapes network routing, with implications for bio-inspired networks and self-healing materials.

Climate-Emergent Disease: An Environmental Epidemiology Case Study

Independent project

I built a realistic fictional scenario, a virus that emerges as climate change reshapes its environment, and am working it through as a quantitative case study in environmental epidemiology.

Philosophy

Three papers, each under peer review at a university-level journal.

Meritocracy and Justice: Can They Coexist?

Under review at Stance (Ball State University).

A metaphilosophical and epistemological critique of meritocracy, asking whether a system that distributes goods by merit can ever be compatible with justice.

Between the Absurdity of Consciousness and Fermi's Paradox

Under review at the International Journal of Astrobiology (Cambridge University Press).

If the universe is vast and old, where is everyone? This paper proposes an existential-psychological answer to Fermi's paradox, rooted in the absurdity of consciousness itself.

Fallacy of the Four-Omni God

Ongoing work; to be soon completed.

A logical critique of a God defined as omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipresent, showing where those attributes contradict one another. It closes by arguing that religious texts, even where they resist logical deduction, can still be read as cross-cultural expressions of the human condition.

Poetry and Writing

Crepuscularity

Poetry manuscript · Shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize for Books

The Letter Review Prize is an international literary prize open to writers of any age; Crepuscularity was shortlisted in its unpublished-books category.

  • Poems published, with payment, in Emerge Literary Journal

  • Honorable Mention, with payment, NFSPS Manningham Trust Student Poetry Contest, National Federation of State Poetry Societies

  • Shortlist, Lumiere Essay Award

Talks and Other Work

  • "Introductory Concepts of Topology," invited talk, St. Petersburg College Honors Society Annual Math Conference; invited back as a senior

  • Neutron-star equation-of-state explorer: a WebGL visualizer with a live Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff solver, built at a hackathon

  • Certificates: Harvard CS50 (computer science); IBM quantum computing (quantum information and computation)

  • : Calvary Christian High School: Tour Guide, Student Leader, & Ambassador

  • St. Petersburg Collegiate HS: Primary Speaker & Student Leader

  • Speeches:

    • St. Petersburg Collegiate HS - Prospective Family Night Talk on the HS Experience; large crowd.

    • 25th Anniversary ​Anne Frank Humanitarian Awards - Service Talk; invited back to the Florida Holocaust Museum​

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