My Story
How a wildfire evacuation turned into a robot built to stop the next one — and what that says about how I work.
The Spark
In 2020, the CZU Complex Fires came close enough to force my family out of our home for nearly three months. Watching what that did to our neighbors and our community stuck with me — and it's the reason wildfire prevention has stayed at the center of my work ever since.
On the engineering side, it started with drones. In 2022, as a middle schooler, I built my first real engineering project — Flying High with Drones — and entered it in the Santa Cruz County Science Fair. I placed 1st in Physics. The following year I built Ultrasonic Eyes, testing how accurately an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor could detect obstacles under different temperatures and materials. That one won 1st place in Physics again, plus an award from IEEE.
Those two projects taught me the thing that's stuck with me since: I don't really understand an idea until I've built a version of it that can fail in front of a judge. See all projects →
Building & Learning
This is the stretch where things got harder, and more interesting. I joined X Academy Hephaestus Robotics and started competing in the MATE ROV Competition — first on the Navigator team in 2024, then moving to Ranger in 2025 as Electrical Engineer/Circuit Designer, custom-designing the PCBs for the ROV's internal electronics. Our team placed 2nd in Northern California both years and took 3rd at the MATE ROV World Championship in Michigan.
On the science side, I moved from pure physics into sensors and code: Towards Sensor Fusion (2024) combined LiDAR, ultrasonic, and infrared sensor data to precisely locate objects, and in 2025 I built a project comparing CNN architectures for self-driving car safety — ResNet-50 hit 77% accuracy classifying road signs, against 23% for VGG-16. That project also won 1st place in Computer Science at the county fair, plus a Genius Olympiad award. That same summer I worked as a software intern at Karr Company, on the backend of a traffic violation app, and volunteered with YouthServe on environmental clean-ups around Santa Cruz. Full robotics history →
The Breakthrough
Everything came together this year. As VP of ROV Engineering, leading a group of three coders, I helped take our team to 1st place in Northern California and then to 1st place at the MATE ROV World Championship in Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada — beating 47 teams from 15 countries. At the county science fair, I earned Best in Show, Senior Division and qualified as an ISEF Finalist. At ISEF itself, I won a First Award of $500 from the Patent and Trademark Office Society. And with Fireguard — the autonomous wildfire detection and suppression system I co-founded with my sister Aria for The Conrad Challenge — I was named a Distinguished Conrad Innovator.
I also spent the summer at Stanford University, completing CS106EA: Exploring Artificial Intelligence — building a real foundation in machine learning pipelines, neural networks, and generative AI that's shaping what I want to build next. All awards → · Press coverage →
What's Next
This year I'm building an autonomous wildfire suppression robot — a prototype that uses a YOLOv8 model, sensors, and thermal imaging to detect fire and activate suppression on its own in rough terrain. I've been running my own heat-resistance experiments, testing multilayer material combinations to protect the onboard electronics, and conducted user research with the Fire Marshal in San Jose along the way.
I'm also taking Math 207: Linear Algebra through the University of North Dakota for undergraduate credit, alongside a senior-year course load of AP English Literature, AP Physics C (E&M), AP Microeconomics, AP Statistics, and Topics in Design & Engineering. Read the full project write-up →
A lifelong curiosity about anything that moves
Cars, drones, and machines in general have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. When I was 10, I downloaded Mega Machines by Paul Harrison on my Kindle, expecting a simple kids' book about sports cars — instead I found detailed specs on some of the most advanced machines of the time, and I was hooked on the engineering behind them. I've been going to Maker Faire Bay Area for years to watch drone racing and see what other people are building, and I'm lucky enough to live close to Monterey Car Week, where I've seen some genuinely rare hypercars in person. Anything that moves, I want to understand how.
Tenacity in learning cutting-edge topics
When Tesla moved from radar and ultrasonic sensors to camera-only collision detection in 2023, I decided to build my own image-detection AI model with no prior experience in the field. I hit plenty of obstacles and failures along the way, but I was having too much fun learning to train and deploy models to let that discourage me. Those early failures turned out to be the foundation for several AI systems I've built since.
A relentless passion for robots that help our ecosystems
In 11th grade, I spent three months getting my firefighting robot to work, and another two improving it to make it as effective as possible. I put in countless late nights on the hardware and software — to the point that I had the Raspberry Pi's reboot sound memorized for weeks afterward. It was hard, and I gave up a lot of sleep for it, but the satisfaction of finally getting it right made all of it worth it.
Hands-on experimentation, even outside engineering
I've cooked since I was 12, when I finally earned my parents' trust to use the stove, and I've spent over four years experimenting with one dish in particular: avocado toast. It's an easy dish to get boring, so I kept testing combinations of sweetness, spice, tang, and texture to avoid the usual mushiness. After a lot of failed, genuinely unpleasant attempts, I landed on a version with honey-roasted peanut butter for sweetness, roasted chilies for heat, fried jalapeño bits for crunch, and a fried egg for richness and color.