As a final project for my first year programming course, my team built a basic wind tunnel simulator in Python using a finite volume approach with a Newton-Krylov solver regime for the steady-state, compressible Euler equations.

Back in 2023, I spearheaded the launch of a student-to-student mentorship program at Clayton-Bradley Academy called Student Success. Since then, I have been building the program from the ground up. I have just passed on my leadership role, and I am proud of the organization we have built.

I competed on my school’s Greenpower USA racing team the first year we participated in the program. The competition involves designing and building a race car, looking for sponsors, utilizing CAD and Computational fluid dynamics, and giving presentations. Although there have been many team projects throughout my academic career, this particular project really illustrated to me how different people with different strengths can come together to build something one individual could not have done alone.

I recently completed my high school senior capstone project. When I was a first-year high school student, Alex Eddlemon and I developed a series of chemical reactions that could be employed to extract oxygen from Martian regolith through thermal decomposition of metal oxides in the presence of hydrogen and electrolysis of the generated water. My capstone project expanded on this research by theorizing a plant to carry out the process, finding possible combinations of design parameters for that plant with a python program, and comparing the process to existing alternatives like NASA's MOxIE.

An informal derivation Grayson Steinbach and I submitted for high school Honors Advanced Mechanics class.

A paper Mary Campbell Doss and I submitted and presented for high school Honors Advanced Mechanics class.

Alex's new video A Week as Kings | Middle Kings 2025 follows him and friends on a one week kayaking journey. It demonstrates his incredible kayaking capabilities as he does things most of us would never dare to do, and is packed with the deep philosophical insights I have come to expect from him. If you have a spare 23 minutes, I can recommend giving it a watch.

Me presenting to CBA's faculty, staff, and administrators on the Student Success tutoring program

You can order your own copy of Noodles, Rice, and Everything Nice here.

In November of 2024, I spent a week with my fellow seniors in Dinétah on the CBA senior trip. The experience was life-changing for all of us.

There is a concept in mathematics and physics--specifically nonlinear dynamics--called chaos. You have probably heard of the butterfly effect: the idea that small changes to a variable in a complex system can result in massive changes in an outcome (the name was coined by Edward Lorenz based on the premise that a butterfly flapping its wings could ultimately cause a tornado). But human society itself, too, is susceptible the laws of physics. In Fluke, British philosopher Brian Klaas examines human society as a chaotic system. Through captivating historical examples, he demonstrates that each and every action taken by each and every person can have massive, disproportional impacts on the future, but that it is also neurologically and computationally impossible to predict what each individual action will ultimately change. The result of considering society as a chaotic system is the realization that cause is not proportional to effect and that sometimes we simply get lucky. Humans inhabit this planet because long ago, the appropriate chemical reactions just happened to occur to synthesize single-celled organisms that later evolved into the vast biota that inhabit Earth today. This "Fluke" is just one in an incomprehensibly large series of coincidences that led to the world being exactly like it is now. As a reader, the book sent me down a path of reflection on all the simple, seemingly irrelevant choices I have made that ultimately made a massive difference in my current life. But the other striking realization the book asks us to grapple with is that just as our own every action changes our path-dependent futures, so do the actions of those around us--or even the ones of those whom we have never met. And as our civilization becomes more interconnected, the system becomes more complex, and the presence of chaos is further accentuated.

In the summer of 2024, I was one of approximately 50 students chosen from across the United States to participate in a course at Purdue University entitled: Developing Tomorrow's Infrastructure: An Introduction to Civil Engineering. The course explored the exciting innovations happening in Civil Engineering, Infrastructure, and construction.