Education

Illinois State University

Normal, IL · Aug 2021 – May 2025

B.S. in Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics

Web development coursework: completed three semester-long web development projects (IT 326, IT 353 and IT 391) using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Vue.js, Java, SQL, NoSQL, Firebase and Figma.

Languages from my coursework:

  • Java
  • C
  • C++
  • Python
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • PHP

Machine learning research

Three projects with ISU faculty.

Predicting stress forces in materials

Used graph neural networks (GNNs) to model stress forces.

  • Graph neural networks (GNNs)

Fake news detection (UPFD)

IT 299: Independent Honors Study

Rebuilt a published research model that uses GNNs and text encoders to classify news as factual or non-factual. Training and tuning were automated with MLflow and Optuna.

  • Graph neural networks (GNNs)
  • Text encoders
  • MLflow
  • Optuna

Code ↗Paper ↗

Virtual spider agent

MAT 268: Undergraduate Research in Mathematics

Trained a reinforcement learning agent in Unity with ML-Agents to follow a moving target, and presented the results at the ISU Research Symposium.

  • Reinforcement learning
  • Unity ML-Agents

Poster ↗

Leadership & activities

  • Game Development Club: ran meetings and made project-wide decisions for a club of 20+ active members, building games in C# and Unity with GitHub.
  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): gave presentations at club events.
  • Kept both commitments going while taking six classes a semester during the final two semesters.