About

about myself

Hi, I’m Karena. I’m a senior applied scientist ii at a self-driving car company based in SF.

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, or learning yoga in the mountains, or in the middle of a good book.

career

2021-now

senior applied scientist ii

cruise llc

design the core machine learning algorithms that decide how our self-driving car will ultimately make decisions on the road. led the design of the primary frameworks for testing & evaluation the car’s behavior.

summer 2019

prediction engineering intern

lyft level 5

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

education

2015-2021

control and dynamical systems phd

caltech

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

2011-2015

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.

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