Past
I have worked on other exciting projects too, including research, course assignments, and personal projects. This non-exhaustive list contains some of the recent / interesting work that I have done. Note that a majority, but not all of them, are physics-related. Also note that topics are ordered first by type and then in reverse chronological order.
[Research] Measuring material losses in superconducting quantum circuits using coplanar waveguide microwave resonators
Last summer, I worked on a research project in the intersection of physics and materials science. My final goal was improve the coherence time of superconducting qubits, a particular type of building block for quantum computers. To achieve that, I investigated devices called microwave resonators. Qubits make use of superconducting microwave resonators to communicate, and understanding those can help us understand superconducting qubits too. In this context, my goal was to characterize the signal losses induced by different materials and fabrication techniques, which can help guide future qubit designs.
This research was supported by the Baker Program in Undergraduate Research.
[Research] Migration of giant planets in protoplanetary disks
During Spring and Summer of 2022, I investigated the migration behavior of giant planets in protoplanetary disks. Until recently, it was thought that they can only migrate inwards (i.e. towards their host stars). However, new studies have shown that for circular orbits planets can migrate outwards too. This is due to the interplay between the disk and the planet. In this context, I investigated the more general case of elliptical orbits, characterizing the effect of planet eccentricity on the migration rate and direction of giant planets. I modified the FARGO3D code, a hydrodynamics simulator, to allow the simulation of planetary systems with low-mass gas disks. Simulations ran for a few days, and I created routines to compute disk eccentricity, and various types of torques (total, wave, and mean flow torques) in real time.
This research was supported by Northwestern’s Summer Undergraduate Research.
[Course] Intro to Music
- “Scientific Data Sonification”: A short essay introducing the concept via two different examples. Essay
[Course] Optics Laboratory
For all these reports, I was the primary writer of the “measurements and data analysis” sections. I also contributed heavily to the “apparatus” sections.
[Course] Observational Astrophysics
- “Orbital Period and Mass Measurement of 51 Pegasi B”: A reproduction of the famous 1995 discovery of 51 Pegasi B, which in part led to the 2019 Nobel prize. Summary.
- “Measurement of the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud using Classical Cepheids”: I combine recent data releases from the Gaia observatory with the OGLE Collection of Variable Stars to tentatively improve old measurements. Although my final results are not “good”, I got the highest score in class with this project. Report / GitHub project.
[Course] Advanced Topics in Nonlinear Dynamics
This class has a specific focus in Network Science as a branch of physics. For my final project, I collected data to create and analyze a network of influences formed by artists from different places and time periods. This was a topic of my choice.
- “A Network Science Approach to the World of Painters”: Do painters form communities? If yes, what do they look like? Can I predict who are going to be the most famous or influential artists? I go after these and other fascinating questions about the topic. Poster / Slides.
[Course] Global History
I am not particularly proud of my writing assignments in this course. I wrote them on a rush, 1 or 2 days before the deadline, while dealing with import issues in my family. I also don’t necessarily agree with the arguments I use, they were just what I had read more about at the time. However, my instructors seemed to like my work, and I got in the Top 10% of a class with 200 students. As I am no specialist, I decided to trust them and include the papers I wrote for this class as a sample of my writing. Themes were not chose by me, of course.
- “Two visions”: An essay contrasting two perspectives for thinking about the age of carbon: Steven Pinker’s from Enlightenment Now and Naomi Klein’s from This Changes Everything. Essay.
- “Why is anyone still poor?”: An answer to the question: “Since 1750, the world has seen exponential economic growth and the introduction of countless new technologies. Why are many people still poor?” Essay.
[Course] Machine Learning
This is a short project that I did for a final exam in electrical engineering. It consists of programming a machine learning model from scratch in the C programming language. My code is now used as an example in newer iterations of this class.
- Electrical Engineering Final Exam: GitHub project.
[Course] 2d Computer Graphics
This is an introductory course in 2D Computer Graphics for Master’s and Undergraduate students. The main topic of study is vector graphics rendering. By the end of the course, students should thoroughly understand, both in theory and in practice, all the steps required to produce high-quality renderings of vector graphics illustrations. My final project was writing my own vector graphics renderer.
- 2d-computer-graphics: GitHub project.
[Personal] Evolutionary Robotics
In this project, I used Python to evolve locomotion in virtual creatures. I coded the neural network, the evolutionary algorithm, and mutation mechanisms. I also stored the evolved creatures in URDF format, a standard file type used in robotics, so that the creature’s physical design can be used to build robots with improved locomotion capabilities.
- evolvable-bots: GitHub project.