About
I'm the Senior Director of AI/ML Research Engineering at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard. I lead a group of AI/ML experts who build foundation models from scratch, along with the AI platforms, workflows, and tools that support research on the institute's AI cluster.
Our work includes multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) for image and video understanding, mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, flow-mapping optimization, reinforcement learning systems, and tools such as KempnerInsight, KempnerPulse, and KempnerForge.
I've been at Harvard since 2017. I founded the university's first central Research Software Engineering team and later architected the Kempner AI cluster, which ranked third among US academic supercomputers on the TOP500 in November 2024 and again in June 2026. I stay hands-on in CUDA, GPU performance, and distributed training.
Before Harvard, I earned a PhD in mechanical engineering at the City College of New York, where I wrote parallel simulation codes and built and ran a 640-core HPC cluster.
Experience
Senior Director of AI/ML Research Engineering
Kempner Institute, Harvard University
- Lead teams of AI/ML experts building foundation models and core ML codebases.
- Built the team from the ground up, defining its roles, establishing a dedicated AI/ML job family at Harvard, and hiring every member.
- Architect the AI infrastructure and stay hands-on in CUDA, distributed training, and foundation-model training.
- Build scalable MLOps pipelines that run on the AI cluster and in the cloud.
- Led the Kempner Computing Handbook, accessed from 110+ countries.
Associate Director of Research Software Engineering
Harvard University
- Launched Harvard's first central Research Software Engineering team.
- Helped define the Research Software Engineering job family at Harvard and grew the team over time, hiring full-stack developers, data engineers, data architects, database engineers, and scientific and research software engineers.
- Partnered with faculty and research groups across Harvard, including Harvard Medical School, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Business School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, in fields such as neuroscience, public health, life sciences, psychology, engineering, and applied mathematics.
- Designed and delivered scalable, large-scale solutions for on-premises HPC clusters and cloud platforms (AWS and GCP).
- Directed StarGlass, an AWS platform for 500+ TB of sky data, and big data platforms for health and climate research.
Senior Scientific Software Engineer
Harvard University
- Architected and built scalable engineering solutions for neuroscience experiments, including open-source behavioral training software and spike-sorting pipelines.
- Optimized research computing infrastructure for data-intensive experiments, including networking, storage, and engineering tools.
Graduate Researcher and HPC Support
City College of New York
- Wrote parallel MPI simulation codes in C/C++ and Fortran that scaled to 1,024+ cores, and built and ran a 640-core HPC cluster.
Education
Graduate Certificate, Data Science and Machine Learning
Harvard University
PhD, Mechanical Engineering (CFD and HPC)
City College of New York
MPhil, Mechanical Engineering
City College of New York