School: Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

About Me: My name is Akash Pamal, and I’m a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. I’m passionate about computer science and artificial intelligence, especially with applications in robotics and DNA science. I’ve competed in and won several hackathons, and I’m a fast learner and extremely dedicated to my work.

I’m the team captain and lead programmer of my FTC robotics team, where I develop project plans and timelines to plan the design and build of a successful robot during the game season. To design the FTC robot, I use CAD platforms like Solidworks and Fusion360. I use Java programming and Android Studio to develop an Android app and incorporate both autonomous and remote control functionality into the robot. Using computer vision and gyroscope sensors, I develop algorithms for robot localization and navigation around the field. As a result of our autonomous program and effective robot design, my team and I advanced to the FIRST World Championship for the last two years consecutively under my leadership.

Project/Research Interests: I’m interested in researching the applications of robotics in biomedical engineering. This includes prosthetic devices with sensory feedback for more accurate and precise control. I’m also interested in working on the gene and genome (more specifically, epigenetics and gene expression). I’d like to develop machine learning models that can predict which genes will be expressed in a given cell.

I recently developed a project that uses Tensorflow to classify images and wrote code to preprocess the raw images and prepare them for training.