Research & Projects

Research & Peer Review

Mississippi Academy of Sciences – Research Presentation

Alcorn State University | 2019–2020

  • Presented research on Cosine Similarity and Citation Analysis at the Mississippi Academy of Sciences Annual Conference.
  • Explored how cosine similarity can measure academic influence through citation networks and text embeddings.
  • Published abstract included in the Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences.

[View Abstract Screenshot]

Research Assistant | Columbia University ISERP

Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), 2021 – 2022

  • Collaborated on the VacSafe–Africa project under the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP).
  • Developed interactive data visualizations and mapping dashboards for public-facing research outputs.
  • Contributed to the preparation and publication of two manuscripts featured on the ISERP research page.

[Publication 1] | [Publication 2]

Peer Reviewer | MLCB 2025 (Machine Learning in Computational Biology)

Ongoing

Academic Projects at Columbia

Johnson & Johnson Capstone Project

Columbia University | 2022

  • Predicted commercial insurance payments for surgical procedures using machine learning in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson.
  • Applied advanced regression models and feature engineering to healthcare cost data for payment prediction.

[View Report] [View Poster]

Fake Job Detection Project (Applied Machine Learning)

Columbia University | 2022

  • Developed a machine learning classifier to detect fraudulent job postings using natural language processing (NLP) and metadata features.
  • Applied TF-IDF vectorization, feature selection, and ensemble models such as Random Forests and XGBoost for detection.
  • Achieved high precision and recall while identifying subtle linguistic and structural cues of fake job listings.

[View Report]

US Equity Statistical Arbitrage Project

Independent Work | 2025

  • Implemented trading strategies from the research paper “Statistical Arbitrage in the US Equity Market”.
  • Developed and backtested a robust arbitrage model for exploiting market inefficiencies using Python.

[GitHub]

Teaching & Academic Service

Mathematics Tutor / Teaching Assistant | Alcorn State University

2018–2021

  • Served as a Mathematics Tutor and TA for three years, assisting undergraduates in algebra, calculus, and statistics courses.
  • Helped improve student comprehension through one-on-one sessions and structured problem-solving exercises.

Competitions

Stellar Blockchain Hackathon

3rd Place | Gas Price Prediction Challenge

  • Developed a gas price prediction model using XGBoost, LightGBM, and Gradient Boosting.
  • Ranked top three globally for accuracy and feature interpretability.

[View Certificate]