About Myself

Hi, I’m Karena. I am currently exploring new opportunities at the intersection of education and technology. I previously worked at Cruise as a Senior Applied Scientist II on the Behaviors team.

In my spare time, I work with engineering start-ups to:

  • Curate tech content and documentation
  • Tech onboarding curricula


I am:

  • A self-starter and eager to learn anything and everything
  • Passionate about teaching, communication, and collaboration

You can sometimes find me running, hiking, learning something new, or in the middle of a good book.

Career

Oct 2021-Nov 2024
cruise-logo

Senior Applied Scientist II

Cruise LLC

  • Core AV Decision-Making Model. Re-architecture of the ml-model led to >40% impact for safety critical performance on the road; Developed and scaled core workflows for feature development, and testing and eval.
  • Behavior Testing and Evaluation. Led team in designing and implementing a pre-merge behavioral testing protocol that has caught >5x behavioral regressions in simulation with >3x time improvement in eval workflows.
  • Behaviors 101/201. Spearheaded the development of two courses on the end-to-end architectural design of the AV stack and standard engineering workflows. Organized and led 19 sessions with ~100 avg attendees/session. ~6000 page views for course site.
  • Autonomy Docs Website. Championed and led the creation of Cruise’s Autonomy Org website, centralizing and making critical documentation accessible for the Perception, Behaviors, and Motion teams.
2021-now
lyft-logo

Educational Content Designer Contractor

  • Content Creation for System Design and Data Structures courses for the interview prep start-up Exponent.
  • Developer User Guide Design for the Extraction-Transform-Load (ETL) startup Teleport and data startup Yscape.
Summer 2019
lyft-logo

Prediction Engineering Intern

Lyft Level 5

Innovated new ML models based and improved the accuracy of existing prediction tools by 30%.

Education

2015-2021
caltech-logo

Control and Dynamical Systems PhD

Caltech

Created the notion of behavioral contracts to formally guarantee safety and progress of self-driving cars.

  • CMS TAs Lead Hosted workshop to mentor TAs and teach best practices. Created and designed CMS TAs website for source of best TA practices.
  • Healthy Collaboration Workshop Organized and hosted a workshop to encourage healthier collaborations at Caltech. Created this website to share key lessons.
2011-2015
princeton-logo

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Bachelors

Princeton University

Minors: Applications of Computing, Robotics and Intelligent Systems.
Library regular, E-Quad inhabitant, made friends, built and broke stuff, and investigated how nature could inspire robotics.

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Skills

Math

  • Linear Algebra
  • Optimization
  • Probability
  • Stochastic Processes

Coding

  • Python
  • Pytorch
  • JAX
  • Tensorflow
  • C++
  • SQL
  • ROS

Machine Learning

  • Machine Learning
  • Data Mining
  • Deep Generative Models

Tools

  • GPT 4.0
  • Claude Opus
  • Github with Copilot
  • Figma
  • Lucidchart
  • Cursor
  • Streamlit
  • DiagramGPT