After my internship at CERN, I began my PhD at Princeton University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as part of the Plasma Control Group under the supervision of Egemen Kolemen.
My focus was on the geometry optimization of high-temperature superconducting pancake coils, aiming to achieve stronger magnetic fields, one of the keys for advancing fusion energy systems. To do this, I built a differentiable simulation in JAX, optimizing coil geometry by minimizing a loss function with automatic differentiation (same principles behind modern ML). My work involved solving elliptic integrals, but JAX didn’t support them. So I wrote a package called jaxellip.
As part of the Software Engineering for Scientific Computing class, we developed our own finite-element software with built-in CAD, meshing, and solver. It’s called FastFEM.
I also did some work on stochastic coil optimization for stellarators, contributing to DESC, a stellarator optimization code developed in my group (see the PR).
In May 2025, I paused my PhD studies to fully commit to building Academa.