About
I am a first-year student at Oregon State University. For the last two years I have been building software full time outside of school — a semantic memory system, a second install of it for business use, and an AI product that is live and has users.
The thread through all three is retrieval and honesty about it: getting the right information back out of a large pile of it, and making the system say so when it cannot. Most of what I have learned came from measuring something I assumed was working and finding out it was not.
Before software I spent five years on water polo, which is where I learned what practising something badly for a long time feels like from the inside.
Technical work
Product Development Intern · FORGE
June 2026 — present
- Build and run Open Brain, a semantic memory system on Postgres with pgvector: capture from anything that can be linked to it — a frontend like Carrel or Docket, Gmail, Telegram, WhatsApp, documents — embeddings through OpenRouter, and a hosted MCP server that exposes the corpus to any AI assistant. Built solo, with twice-weekly check-ins for direction. Carrel is the frontend, and I use it daily.
- Measured retrieval rather than assuming it. A harness of six probes against a real transcript took the corpus from none of them answerable to all six, by chunking with context and then reranking what came back — and set the relevance floor against a question the corpus cannot answer, so the system declines instead of confidently answering anything.
- Researched what data and tools small-business owners actually use, and turned the finding — that every specialised tool captures well and leaks at retrieval across time — into a three-layer schema: a universal core carrying at most one interchangeable domain layer.
- Rebuilt the whole system as a second, fully separate install for business use, so the pitch could be something a business owner recognises rather than a student's course load. Building it is also what turned the layering from a claim into a fact: same core, different domain, nothing changed below the layer boundary.
Planetary Sciences Intern · University of Oregon
Summer 2023
- Measured crater sizes from image mosaics of Saturn's moons, working from raw data rather than a prepared set.
- Learned Linux and Anaconda on the job, and used Python to move measurements out of QGIS into a form that could actually be graphed and analysed.
- Worked largely independently, with a mentor reviewing results rather than directing the work.
Education
Oregon State University · Undergraduate
2026 — present
Sheldon High School · Graduated, Honors program
2022 — 2026
- AP Biology, AP US History, AP World History
- Honors Literature (three years), Honors Global Studies
Employment
Busser and Cook · Papa's Pizza Parlor
May 2025 — present
- Front and back of house, through service.
Lifeguard · Willamalane
November 2023 — February 2025
- Year-round, 10–15 hours a week alongside a full school and training schedule.
Assistant Landscaper · Brett Herman's Lawn and Garden Service
Summers 2021 and 2022
- Grounds and yard maintenance, roughly 20 hours a week.
Water polo
I played water polo for five years — club and high school, utility and attacker — at 15 hours a week through the school year and 28 through the summer. I captained the Sheldon High School team and played varsity through the 2025–26 season, and I swam varsity alongside it. I stopped when I graduated.
- Team captain, Sheldon High School — 2023 and 2024 seasons
- Team MVP — 2023 season
- USA Water Polo Junior Olympics — 2023 and 2024
- USA Water Polo ODP Pacific Northwest regional team — 2025
- Varsity swim, state 100m relay team — 2025