Service & Teaching
Teaching Assistantships
Northwestern University
COMP_ENG 357: Design Automation in VLSI (Spring 2025)
- Course Instructor: Prof. Hai Zhou
- Responsibilities: Course project guidance, assignment grading, student office hours
- Student projects guided: Parallel Program for circuit optimization (GPU), Magnetic field aware floorplanning and routing optimization
- Topics covered: VLSI design flows, synthesis tools, formal verification, design optimization
COMP_ENG 334: Fundamentals of Blockchains and Decentralization (Fall 2021)
- Course Instructor: Prof. Dongning Guo
- Responsibilities: Student project guidance and mentoring
- Key project: Guided students in implementing a Rust-based blockchain cryptocurrency system
- Topics covered: Blockchain fundamentals, cryptographic protocols, decentralized systems
COMP_ENG 303: Advanced Digital Design (Spring 2023)
- Course Instructor: Prof. Seda Ogrenci
- Responsibilities: Laboratory instruction, student guidance, assignment evaluation
- Topics covered: Advanced digital circuit design, FPGA programming, hardware description languages
COMP_ENG 205: Fundamentals of Computer System Software (Winter 2023)
- Course Instructor: Prof. Russ Joseph
- Responsibilities: Student instruction and guidance in assembly programming and computer program structure
- Topics covered: Assembly language programming, computer system architecture, low-level programming concepts
COMP_ENG 203: Introduction to Computer Engineering
- Winter 2024: Course Instructor Prof. Hai Zhou
- Fall 2025: Course Instructor Prof. Jakub Szefer
- Responsibilities: Laboratory instruction and guidance, lab experiment evaluation and grading, conducting TA sessions
- Topics covered: Digital logic design, computer organization, assembly language programming
- Served for multiple quarters with different instructors, demonstrating teaching adaptability
Academic Service
Conference Review Activities
Peer Review Service:
- AAAI 2027 - Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Program Committee)
- ICCAD 2026 - IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design
- ASP-DAC 2026 - Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
- AAAI 2026 - Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- HOST 2025 - IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust
- HOST 2024 - IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust
Peer review contributions span design automation, artificial intelligence, and hardware security domains, reflecting interdisciplinary research expertise.
Industry Experience
Cadence Design Systems — Research & Development Intern
Summer 2026 – Present (returning intern)
- Building GNN-based routing congestion prediction for the Palladium (Z4) emulator, forecasting congestion from netlist and placement features to guide routing on industrial designs.
Summer 2024
- Integrated GPU-accelerated placement (DREAMPlace) into Palladium (Z3) design flows, achieving 6–12× speedup over CPU baselines on multi-million-cell designs while maintaining solution quality.
- Analyzed CUDA kernel performance and built interfaces bridging academic GPU kernels with commercial flows for heterogeneous CPU–GPU execution.
Teaching Approach
As a teaching assistant, I am committed to:
- Hands-on Learning: Providing practical experience with industry-standard EDA tools and methodologies
- Individual Support: Offering personalized guidance to help students overcome technical challenges
- Research Integration: Connecting coursework to current research developments in computer engineering
- Collaborative Environment: Fostering an inclusive learning environment that encourages questions and exploration
My experience spans foundational computer engineering concepts through advanced VLSI design automation, allowing me to support students at various levels of their academic journey.