PhD Student in Computational & Data Sciences
Danforth Scholar

CV
🎓 Google Scholar
🤗 Huggingface
About:

I am a Research & Data Scientist Intern at NextEra Energy (Analytics) and a Ph.D. student at the Washington University in St Louis Computational & Data Sciences program. My Ph.D. is supported by the generous funding of the Danforth Scholarship.

Research Interests:

I conduct research at the intersection of applied natural language processing (NLP) and public health. Broadly, my research focuses on applying large language models (LLMs) and social media mining tools to address health and societal issues. My research primarily utilizes novel data sources, such as text data and mobile phone data.

My recent research works:

  • Uses large language models (LLMs) on digital data (e.g., online forums, social media, news) to generate novel insights into public health issues or collective human behavior.
  • Develop predictive language models or LLM-powered tools in public health and medicine to assist practitioners like community leaders or medical doctors.
  • Utilize novel ‘big’ data sources (e.g, mobile phone data) to address societal challenges in public health and policy decision-making.
  • [NEW] Develop tools and models for low-resource languages (e.g., Persian) to enhance their linguistic capabilities in LLMs.

You can view some of my research works at my publications page.

As an applied data scientist, I aim to use my research to create tangible and practical tools. As such, I actively build, develop and publish open-source software packages on PyPi or trained language models on 🤗 Huggingface.

Education:
  • PhD in Computational & Data Sciences @ Washington University in St Louis, 2022 – present
  • MS (Distinction) in Behavioral & Data Science @ University of Warwick (UK), 2021 – 2022
  • BS in Data Science @ Penn State University, 2018 – 2021
Bio:

I was born and raised in Singapore, but have lived in the US for about 6 years now. I also lived in the UK for about a year where I pursued my Masters Degree, during when Liz Truss premiership was outlasted by a lettuce.

My inter-disciplinary educational background has enabled collaborations with researchers in computational & information sciences, health & recreational sciences, tourism, behavioral sciences & decision-making.

A typical meal for me consists of loads of iced coffee and ramen noodles because that’s what I can mostly afford in this economy, and it’s all I need to survive. My schedule and consistently poor decisions by semi-retired elders has trained me to hibernate only on weekends. For these reasons, I identify as a mixed breed between a human in torpor and a Zumwalt-class destroyer.

I publicly endorse Count Bin Face for Mayor of London, in support of his proposal to “close down shops that play Christmas Music before December and turn them into public libraries”.

You can find more information about me in my CV.