About

I was born in Ho Chi Minh City and grew up in Maryland. Living between two places teaches you to pay attention — to read a room before you trust it — and somewhere along the way that habit turned into a love for building things that have to survive contact with the real world. That is the version of me that showed up at the University of Michigan to study Computer Engineering, where I have kept a 4.0 GPA and earned the Martin & Ellen Chavez Scholarship and a place on the Dean's List.

The first thing I did at Michigan was start something that did not exist yet. U-M Vertical Flight began as a small group of people who wanted to design and build eVTOL aircraft for Vertical Flight Society competitions, and within a single semester we had raised more than $20k and turned that idea into a real team. As Electrical Lead I own the parts that decide whether the aircraft flies at all: power distribution, flight controller integration, and a sensor suite that pairs LiDAR with thermal imaging so the aircraft can navigate on its own.

My research pulls in the opposite direction — away from the workshop and out toward space weather. At the Magnetometer Laboratory I am co-authoring a paper on the first machine learning model that can classify geomagnetic storm events without upstream solar wind data, closing a 48-hour gap that has long stood between forecasters and a true real-time warning. Closer to home, I work with Curtis Ling, the founder and CTO of MaxLinear, on GoFundMI.org, a non-profit that helps student researchers find the funding their work deserves.

Flight hardware, twenty years of magnetometer data, a tool that makes financial data easier to read: from the outside these look like four different lives. To me they are one. I want to build things that are technically honest and genuinely useful, and the most interesting problems tend to live exactly where those two demands meet.