Biography

I am a Machine Learning Engineer on the Driver Understanding ML team at Waymo, where I develop models and agentic harnesses for road-rule compliance and rare, long-tail event detection in autonomous driving. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in May 2026, advised by Prof. Tarek Abdelzaher.

My research focuses on foundation models for time series and multimodal sequential data, making them more robust and data-efficient by incorporating physical domain knowledge into model architectures, objectives, and training regimes. I am especially interested in building models that generalize under label scarcity, sensor heterogeneity, and deployment shift.

Research & Industry Experience

  • Waymo - Machine Learning Engineer, Driver Understanding ML (2026-Present)
  • Waymo - Software Engineer Intern, Driver Understanding ML (2025)
  • US Army Research Laboratory - Research Scientist Intern, Multimodal Foundation Models R&D (2024)
  • Prometeia - Machine Learning Engineer (2020-2022)
  • Turkish Aerospace - Software Design Engineer, Autopilot Systems (2017-2019)