ML Researcher

I had always been interested in AI and machine learning, but at the time I had no real experience in the field. I knew I wanted to get close to the work, so I emailed every ML researcher I could find at Boston University and told them I was willing to learn quickly, work hard, and contribute however I could, even unpaid. Only one person replied: Dr. Tian, who was applying deep learning to neurodegenerative disease research.

He gave me a chance, and the learning curve was exactly as steep as he warned. I had to read papers, learn unfamiliar ML concepts, implement models, and understand how to train and evaluate them in a research setting. Over time, I contributed to work on detecting signs of Alzheimer's disease in brain pathology images, trained models, compared five feature extractors, and helped benchmark accuracy, interpretability, and robustness. It was one of the most technically challenging experiences I have had, and one of the most rewarding because the work felt bigger than myself.