About

Last updated: Sep 10, 2018

Born in Miami, FL to my Chinese mother and Puerto Rican father, I was—and would continue to be—the youngest of three brothers. I was obsessed with tinker toys, legos, video games, and the outdoors.

Speaking didn't come naturally to me—I didn't say my first word until I was 3 years old. It was very concerning, particularly to my dear mother, because both of my older brothers began speaking at the typical age of around 12 months. However, I compensated for my lack of speech by leveraging a wild imagination and thinking in pictures rather than words.

Shortly after I began speaking, my grandmother, who had over 30 years of teaching experience, began tutoring me in various subjects. It was all over when she introduced me to mathematics. Every week, she created a problem set for me and challenged me to perform the calculations in my head as quickly as I could before solving them on paper. I found the experience to be fulfilling and, since then, I've been absolutely obsessed with mathematics and problem solving.

While my grandmother challenged me intellectually, my father challenged me athletically. I officially began playing sports in 6th grade when I tried out for my school's junior varsity baseball team. My father, who has always been passionate about sports, was thrilled by the idea. He consistently took me to batting practice to improve my swing and, while practice was stressfully tough at times, I improved significantly and learned many valuable lessons such as the value of hard work. These lessons stick with me to this day, as I seek to constantly improve at anything I do and make an effort to remain physically active.

During my sophomore year of college, I flew to California to visit my brother, Sam, who was a software engineer at Nest and gained a sense of what the tech world is like. It seemed promising, so decided to study Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics and, a couple of years later, I interned with GE Aviation Systems as a software engineer to gain industry experience.

After graduating, I completed Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program as part of the inaugural class and went on to work at Google as a software engineer for one year. Recently, I’ve transitioned to Verily as a software engineer where I work on Project Baseline.

My life is some combination of engineering, working out, dancing, and doing other fun stuff. It's kind of awesome.