Professional Experience
- Research Associate @ IBM Research - Zurich (2025) [9mo]
- Implemented independent KV-caches (block-sparse attention) in vLLM, achieving:
- • improvements in KV cache hit rates
- • long-context cold-start prefill speedups
- • detailed evaluations / output quality study
- • Explored state combination methods for all hybrid LLM architectures
- (SSM, Liquid, LightningAttn.)
- • Supervised by early and major vLLM contributor
- └> Resulted in public release as IBM's official vLLM public fork
- └> + Arguably the fastest end-to-end implementation of LLM inference
with this feature among the labs
- Project & Design Lead @ Hololearn TU Delft research group (2022) [5mo]
- Based on EU-level research grant
- Assembled and led a 5-person team to develop and
design hologram-based virtual teaching system - Involved full-stack development including 3D+LiDAR data processing
- Attracted collaboration from Technologico de Monterrey
- └> led to further development + CEUR Workshop publication (6 citations)
- Founding Data Scientist @ CorTexter (2020-2021) [1y]
- Developed+designed core ML pipeline for advanced
NLP-based (neural + linguistic) job vacancy analysis - Built multilingual neural job title search engine
- Trained emoji-prediction language model
- └> pipeline still in use after leaving
- Developed+designed core ML pipeline for advanced
- Startup Analyst @ Plug&Play Tech Center (2020-2021) [9mo]
- Major California-based VC fund
- Analyzed hundreds of startup pitch decks
- └> Praised for story-driven final pitch analysis
Research Highlights
- Master's Thesis (2024):
- Introduced novel DL architectures for DNA basecalling
(up to 85% throughput improvement over best Oxford Nanopore model)- Introduction of Chain-of-thought technique to basecalling
- └> led to continuing partnership with Tenstorrent (AI accelerator company)
- Elsevier Publication (2024) (33 citations):
- GNN-based power network prediction model
achieving 48x speedup over non Deep-Learning-based method- └> led to further work in the area by co-authors
- Arxiv Preprint (2023):
- Pioneered RL loss allowing an agent to navigate
through temporary blindness (open loop control)- └> led to a successful research grant
Achievements & Projects
- - Ready to Startup jury winner for space transport platform
(validated by NASA contractor Axiom Space) - - 1st place Yes!Delft Students hackathon for coral reef startup
- - 3rd place Best Delft ideation contest
- - Selected Nova Network member (top ~3% of applicants)
- - Host of UvA/Slim Radio Monday Morning Podcast
interviewing high-achieving students