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.

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

Senior Applied Scientist II

Cruise LLC

Oct 2021-Nov 2024

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 per session.
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.

Technologies:

Python ML ROS C++

Educational Content Designer Contractor

Exponent

Present

Content Creation. For the 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.

Technologies:

Technical Writing Documentation Education

Prediction Engineering Intern

Lyft Level 5

Summer 2019

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

Technologies:

Python ML Prediction Models

Education

Control and Dynamical Systems PhD

Caltech

2015-2021

PhD Research. 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.

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Bachelors

Princeton University

2011-2015

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

Skills

Math

Linear Algebra

Optimization

Probability

Stochastic Processes

Coding

Python

Pytorch

JAX

Tensorflow

C++

SQL

ROS

Machine Learning

Data Mining

Deep Generative Models

Tools

GPT 4.0

Claude Opus

Github with Copilot

Figma

Lucidchart

Cursor

Streamlit

DiagramGPT