Graduate Student · University of Pennsylvania

Hi, I'm Leo.

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I build things that move, compute, and think — from custom speaker transducers and F1 aerodynamics to autonomous quadcopters and distributed cloud platforms from scratch.

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About Me

I'm a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, with a cross-disciplinary background spanning mechanical design, robotics and control, and computer systems.

My work sits at the intersection of physical hardware and intelligent software. I've designed custom speaker transducers in CAD, analyzed F1 wing failures with CFD and FEA, built a GPS-denied quadcopter autonomy stack, and engineered distributed cloud platforms handling millions of records — all from first principles.

I care about systems that work reliably in the real world, which means understanding not just how to build things, but why they fail under real conditions.

10+
Engineering projects
3
Technical domains
1.4M+
Records processed
12K×
Query speedup achieved
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Experience
Superstars — Remote, United States
Software Developer Intern
Jan 2026 – Present Current
  • Built a unified video player component (Angular/TypeScript) standardizing playback, comments, likes, and related-video interactions across the platform, shipping to production across 20K+ video posts and reducing duplicated logic by 60% versus the legacy implementation.
  • Owned the create-post flow on the Angular front end — media selection/upload, composition, client-side validation, and submission against a Node.js/Express + MongoDB REST API — reaching a 65% draft-to-publish conversion rate; wrote unit and end-to-end tests for every component and verified REST flows via Postman.
Modular Robotics Laboratory (PI: Prof. Mark Yim) — University of Pennsylvania
Summer Research Assistant
May 2025 – Aug 2025 Philadelphia, PA
  • Designed and fabricated (SolidWorks CAD, CNC-machined and 3D-printed) the rotation/extrusion subsystem hardware for a direct ink write printer on an Aerotech gantry — syringe cage with snap-lock release, motor mounts, and bearing-supported center shaft.
  • Designed the closed-loop stepper control architecture (rheostat speed input, LCD real-time feedback, interrupt-driven position sensing) and independently procured hardware for a scaled-down validation rig; implementing Arduino (C++) firmware targeting 180 rpm rotation with ±0.5° positional accuracy and 60 mm/s extrusion.
University of Pennsylvania
Teaching Assistant — MEAM 5100 Design of Mechatronic Systems
Aug 2025 – Dec 2025 Philadelphia, PA
  • Revamped the Introduction to Microcontrollers lab module by rewriting code examples and procedures and patching deprecated libraries from the prior-year handout.
  • Supported 70 graduate students through office hours, hands-on debugging, prototyping, and grading.
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Skills & Stack
Languages
Python C++ Java JavaScript SQL MATLAB
Frameworks & Tools
ROS React Node.js PostgreSQL AWS Drake / SNOPT LightGBM Apache Tika
Engineering Software
COMSOL SolidWorks LTSpice ANSYS
Mechanical
CAD / CAM FEA CFD Thermal Analysis Materials Selection GD&T Acoustics
Robotics & Control
Inverse Kinematics MPC ESKF / VIO A* Planning SE(3) Control Trajectory Gen. Computer Vision
CS & Systems
Distributed Systems Query Optimization MapReduce ML / Data Science Multithreading KV Stores
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Projects
University of Melbourne
Integrated Speaker System Design
End-to-end mechanical and electronic design of a near-production speaker: custom woofer and tweeter with CAD-modeled magnetic motor structure and voice coil, a 262×235×634 mm ash-wood enclosure with golden-ratio internal cavity to suppress standing-wave modes, and an LTSpice-simulated 3-band EQ with passive crossover. Materials selected against stiffness, damping, thermal, cost, and manufacturability tradeoffs with 1 mm tolerance allowances throughout.
SolidWorks LTSpice Acoustics Material Selection GD&T Passive Crossover
MEAM 5270
F1 Airfoil Failure Analysis
CFD boundary conditions and airspeed/boundary-distance variable sweep on a COMSOL k-ω SST model of the 1969 Lotus 49B high-mounted rear wing. FEA stress-driven failure study on the wing-and-strut assembly explaining historical material failure under race loading. Supported a 5-level mesh convergence study (3.8K–670K elements) and NACA 0012 validation matching the published 16° stall angle.
COMSOL CFD FEA k-ω SST Mesh Convergence Failure Analysis
MEAM 5100
RoboCart Autonomous Vehicle
Designed sensor mounting brackets and clearance studies in SolidWorks for an autonomous robotic vehicle, validated against neighboring chassis components. Performed COMSOL structural stress analysis on the integrated chassis. Team placed 3rd in the class final competition.
SolidWorks COMSOL Structural Analysis Robotics Hardware Design
MEAM 5200
Franka Panda Block Stacking
Built the null-space inverse-kinematics solver and dynamic-block motion prediction for a Python/ROS manipulation pipeline that detects, picks, and stacks 4 static and 4 dynamic blocks on a Franka Panda arm using camera calibration and safe waypoint execution.
Python ROS Inverse Kinematics Computer Vision Motion Planning Null-Space Control
MEAM 5170
Autonomous Vehicle MPC
Built a TTC-aware behavior planner with hysteresis-bounded multi-obstacle lane changes and a noisy-perception layer for an autonomous driving simulation stack — 6-DOF dynamic bicycle model with Drake/SNOPT receding-horizon MPC, 15 s planning horizon, across 4-way intersection scenarios.
Python Drake MPC SNOPT Behavior Planning Bicycle Model
MEAM 6200
VIO-Based Autonomous Quadcopter
GPS-denied quadcopter autonomy stack in Python: ESKF-based visual-inertial odometry for state estimation, A* graph-search with EDT clearance optimization for planning, minimum-jerk trajectory generation with dynamic-feasibility time allocation, and geometric SE(3) control — validated across maze, window, and over_under simulated environments.
Python ESKF / VIO A* Planning SE(3) Control Trajectory Gen. EDT
CIS 5500
Axiom Shopping Assistant
Shopping analytics platform on PostgreSQL/AWS RDS, Express/Node, and React/Vite over 1.4M+ Amazon products and 3M+ reviews via Python ETL. Achieved up to 12,000× query speedup — 322 s → 494 ms on the top-value query — via composite indexing, materialized views, and EXPLAIN ANALYZE rewrites.
PostgreSQL AWS RDS React / Vite Node.js Query Optimization Python ETL
CIS 5050
PennCloud Distributed Platform
From-scratch cloud platform (webmail + storage + admin) with a custom multithreaded C++ HTTP server, UDP-heartbeat dispatcher for load-balanced redirection, distributed KV store with primary-based sequential consistency, triple replication, operation logs, checkpointing, and recovery. Owned dispatcher, HTTP server, and React frontend; led end-to-end debugging across the stack.
C++ Distributed Systems React KV Store Replication Multithreading
CIS 5550
ACLN Search Engine
Java distributed search engine deployed on 5 AWS EC2 nodes integrating a robots.txt-aware polite crawler, MapReduce TF-IDF indexer with Porter stemming, PageRank job, and a weighted α TF-IDF + β PageRank ranking server with PDF support via Apache Tika. Crawled 5,000+ pages across 250+ unique domains.
Java AWS EC2 MapReduce TF-IDF PageRank Apache Tika
CIS 5450
OpenAlex Research Impact Prediction
Data science pipeline on 70K OpenAlex CS papers (2014–2024) predicting age-normalized citation impact log(1 + cit/yr). Redesigned the target variable and added year-stratified sampling to eliminate temporal leakage and sampling bias. Final LightGBM + neural-network ensemble achieved RMSE 0.5505 / R² 0.4196 vs 0.4083 baseline.
Python LightGBM Neural Networks Feature Engineering OpenAlex API Ensemble