Zane Blood

I am a first year PhD student in the Applied Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology studying Cosmology in Professor Kimmy Wu’s research group. My current research project involves migrating the existing Julia language package CMBLensing.jl into a JAX / PyTorch compatible framework for better integration with future machine learning and data driven projects that we will develop. You can check in on the current progress of the JAX version here and try giving it a spin for yourself.

Before starting my PhD, I worked for 2 years as a full-stack software developer at Epic Systems Corporation - one of the largest electronic medical record vendors in the United States. I was a part of the radiology app and helped co-develop one of our team’s AI functionalities which used prompt engineering to extract discrete data from free text radiological reports. At Epic we worked with standard technologies and frameworks such as C#, TypeScript, React, and SQL.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Physics at Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences in Ithaca, NY in 2023. At Cornell, I worked in Professor Jared Maxson’s experimental accelerator research group. My main research project involved designing, machining, and installing various diagnostics for a table-top accelerator used in ultra-fast electron diffraction experiments. In 2021, I also completed a Research Experience for Undergraduates at Purdue University where I studied the super-conducting diode effect with Professor Jukka Vayrynen. Our work was published in this paper here.