Singapore
Co-founded Mental Health Collective with four friends. Ran COVID operations at the Ministry of Health, coordinating 40,000+ patient workflows.
About
I studied philosophy and literature before Minerva, where I majored in computer science and cognitive science — eight cities, four continents, no fixed campus. Philosophy taught me to question assumptions. Cognitive science shaped how I think about minds: not by assuming how they work, but by sitting with the messy, biased reality of how people actually think. Computer science gave me tools to test what I found and build something real by morning.
Fourteen roles across five countries — software engineer, teacher, developer relations, product manager, a COVID-19 operations task force moving 40,000 patients through Singapore's Ministry of Health. New city, new role, new problem, most of the time before I'd fully unpacked.
With four friends, I co-founded Mental Health Collective, Singapore's first nationwide youth mental health initiative, which eventually reached 3,000+ people. It's still the project that taught me what building for people actually means.
Experience
- 2025 – NowMSCS Student, Columbia University · New York
- 2024DevRel Associate, Quantstamp / Zircuit · San Francisco
- 2023Software Engineer, genomIT · Buenos Aires
- 2023Software Engineer, Columbia University, Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics · New York
- 2022Engineer & PM, Hikingbook · Taipei
- 2018 – 2022Co-Founder, Mental Health Collective · Singapore
Cities
Every four months, a new city, new language, new systems, no playbook.
San Francisco
Built Pulse, Buddy, and SYSCONBENCH independently, before starting an MSCS at Columbia.
Seoul
Studied the tension between rapid tech adoption and cultural preservation.
London
Ran developer relations for Quantstamp's Build To Earn program. Built a submission triage pipeline for 165+ entries, onboarded 200 partner teams.
Berlin
A city that rebuilt itself from scratch — spent the term thinking about what it means to build something that lasts.
Hyderabad
Studied how cultural context shapes experimental methodology — the same research question gets unpacked differently depending on the lens you take.
Taipei
Wrote production code in Mandarin. Conducted SQL analytics on 20,000+ user events.
Buenos Aires
Built genomic data pipelines, applying unsupervised ML to 30,000+ cancer biomarkers — patterns used in 21% of downstream prognosis models. Watched Messi live, ate empanadas and alfajores at midnight. One of the best four months of my life.
Field notes
Yoga Alliance 200-hour certification
Become a certified yoga teacher — anatomy, sequencing, philosophy, how to hold a room, inside a body I'd spent twenty years using mostly as a vehicle for my brain. I came out with a different relationship to my own presence: philosophy taught me how to ask why; yoga taught me how to sit with the answer.
Tore my ACL playing touch rugby
Navigated the healthcare system in a country where I couldn't explain the injury in the local language, then walked differently for three months. I learned how quietly inaccessible our architecture can be — how many buildings assume you can take the stairs, how cities are built for people who don't wait. I no longer take my body for granted.
100km trek across the Arctic
Six days. Tents pitched each night, meals cooked in tin cans under a light that never really goes out. Awe.
One week in total silence
Wake up at 5am, meditate for an hour, practice yoga for another, eat every meal without speaking. I'd spent years confusing motion with meaning — some of the clearest thinking I've ever done happened there, with no phone, no laptop, nothing to prove.
Solo travel through India
Three cities, no plan, staying with strangers, saying yes to whatever the day offered. A filmmaker's mum taught me to shape chapati in her kitchen; a family with two kids took me shopping for fish food on a Sunday morning. I'd thought travel meant seeing things — it turned out the best parts were the afternoons I spent inside someone else's daily life.
Self-taught florist
Started a bouquet business from my kitchen — no training, no suppliers, no brand — and figured out sourcing, pricing, photography, and delivery from scratch. Every bouquet was really a small portrait of the person receiving it. I wasn't selling flowers; I was telling small stories, one delivery at a time.
Seven jobs in twelve months
Drafted legal documents at an insolvency firm. Taught literature to grade 10 students. Made a hundred sales calls a day. Helped move 40,000 COVID-19 patients through a Ministry of Health system. Starting from zero seven times in a row taught me that being new isn't a weakness — it's a position with its own kind of clarity. You notice things people inside the system might not.
Community
Minerva cohort
Living and studying with people from 78 countries taught me there's no universal default. Every assumption I had about how people think, eat, argue, grieve, or build — someone in my cohort did it differently.
Mental Health Collective
We turned a desire to change the status quo into a 3,000-person national conference.
Co-Curricular Activities Council
The job wasn't running things. It was making the people running things feel seen.
Asia-Pacific Young Leaders' Summit
Learned how to create spaces grounded in curiosity.
Touch Rugby Varsity
Learned to show up with enthusiasm every day.
Students' Council
Led the planning and execution of 11 school-wide events.
The interview project
150 conversations · 45 countries · 28% response rate · 23% meeting booked
CEOs, professors, authors, a butcher who became a vegan food founder — no warm intros, no platform, no budget. Just me, LinkedIn, and a question I couldn't let go of: what does it mean to live a meaningful life?
I built my first outbound playbook in 2020, before AI existed to help. Manual research, A/B tested subject lines in spreadsheets, response rates tracked by hand. Eight message templates across 200+ prospects, testing length, personalization depth, and call-to-action framing. Curiosity-driven outreach outperformed open-ended asks three to one.
The harder question was about growth itself: how do you get busy, successful people to care about an unknown college student's questions? Not luck — treating every rejection as a data point. Twenty people ignore the seven-sentence version? Try three sentences. Still nothing? Change the subject line, then send a hundred more.
By conversation 150, I had a playbook that worked in any room, in any country, at any level of seniority.
"People who'd figured something out weren't chasing credentials. They were obsessed with work that mattered to them."