About

Education

I graduated from MIT with a B.Sc. in Mathematics and in Computer Science and Engineering, where I was advised by Professor Alexei Borodin and Professor John Guttag. I started my research journey at Professor Klavs Jensen’s group working with (now Professor) Andrew Zahrt. The combination of work in the wet lab and computational analysis suited me well, and it was then that I became interested in using machine learning for science. I continued to Professor Connor Coley’s group, where I worked closely with (soon Professor) Wenhao Gao. I stayed there for wondeful 2 years during which I learned most of what I know about scientific research, even to this day. During my last year of college I wanted to learn more about deep learning. I was very fortunate to work with Professor Kaiming He whose mentorship was invaluable for my decision to pursue a career in the field. During that time, I began collaborating with (soon Professor) Yossi Gandelsman on something cool that should be out soon! I was also priveleged to work with Professor Stephen Bates on more theoretical topics related to statistics. I like working on theoretically grounded ideas, and I usually try to push projects on the theory to practice pipeline. Fun fact: I was one of the first few members in Kaiming’s group and in Stephen’s group.

Research

My research tackles the problem of discovering new functional materials. I approach this problem by developing machine learning models to navigate the enormous chemical design space more efficiently than traditional scientific methods. A central focus of my work addresses the fundamental challenge of limited labeled data by using unsupervised learning (“we only have one Internet”). Recently, I’ve become interested in using flow-based generative modeling to accelerate molecuar dynamics simulations.

Fun

In my free time, I enjoy swimming 🏊 and playing strategic games like chess ♞. I’m generally a big sports fan. My favorites are soccer and basketball, but you probably can’t find a sport I wouldn’t enjoy doing/playing/watching.

I’m also passionate about education and teaching 🧑‍🎓. I spent a year mentoring the Israeli International Chemistry Olympiad team, where I participated twice as a high school student. At MIT, I was an undergraduate teaching assistant for 18.650: Fundamentals of Statistics. I also taught my own class 6.S085: Machine Learning for Molecular Design together with Wenhao Gao who was my research supervisor at the time.