Vetted Research Assistants in Illinois

Yishi Wang

Screened

Junior Machine Learning & Data Science professional specializing in LLMs and analytics

Chicago, IL3y exp

“Amazon internship experience building production GenAI analytics for the returns organization: a multi-agent LLM+RAG system that let analysts query multiple heterogeneous data sources in natural language without hand-written SQL. Also built and operationalized four Apache Airflow DAGs for large-scale ETL, emphasizing observability and freshness-aware metadata to keep outputs accurate and up to date.”

Jacqueline Zhang

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning Engineer specializing in LLMs, fairness, and healthcare ML

Illinois, USA4y exp

“ML/NLP practitioner with a master’s thesis focused on domain-adaptive knowledge distillation for LLMs (LLaMA2/sheared LLaMA), showing improved perplexity and ROUGE-L on biomedical data. Also built real-world data linking and search systems: integrated ClinicalTrials.gov with FAERS using fuzzy matching + embeddings, and delivered an LLM-powered FAQ recommender at Hyperledger using sentence-transformers, FAISS, and fine-tuning to mitigate embedding drift.”

“Applied Scientist with legal-tech experience who builds production LLM systems. Created and deployed Quibo AI, a LangGraph-based multi-agent pipeline that turns large markdown/Jupyter inputs into polished blogs and social posts, overcoming context limits via ChromaDB + HyDE RAG. Also built a large-scale iterative code-evolution workflow using multi-model orchestration (GPT/Claude/Gemini) with testing, debugging loops, and evaluation/observability practices.”

Dylan Tang

Screened

Intern Software Developer and ML Researcher specializing in medical imaging and computer vision

Chicago, IL0y exp

“AI/ML practitioner with experience spanning audio/LLM applications (built "Iota" using Whisper, tiktoken, and a local Ollama-served LLM) and healthcare ML (Facemed.ai; UChicago Radiology). Demonstrates a production-oriented mindset—focus on data/model fit, deterministic field testing, and operational safeguards—and has improved research evaluation workflows via a hash-table-based concurrent model tracking approach.”

Seyi R. Afolayan

Screened

Mid-level Robotics & Controls Engineer specializing in safe autonomy and perception-aware motion planning

Itasca, IL4y exp

“Robotics software engineer who built an open-source, real-time Cartesian controller for Universal Robots UR5/UR5e, targeting sub-mm accuracy at 500 Hz within ROS2/ros2_control. Demonstrates strong real-time debugging skills (timing profiling, singularity handling with Tikhonov regularization) and sim-to-real iteration using Gazebo/Isaac Sim plus physical hardware tuning; also has ROS1 experience building URDF/xacro and EKF configs for an underwater vehicle and has developed drone/robot packages.”

“PhD-trained engineer with ~3.5 years of consulting experience building simulation/ML-driven manufacturing software. Deployed an ML surrogate model as a .NET C# DLL integrated with MES workflows, and resolved a critical pre-production latency issue by redesigning serialization/storage. Also built Python-based integrations across CAD/CAE tools and cloud material databases using an XML data model, with a strong interest in digital twins and real-to-sim/sim-to-real robotics workflows.”

“Researcher from the University of South Dakota who built a production medical RAG system to help interpret model predictions by retrieving relevant clinical notes and medical literature, overcoming retrieval accuracy and imaging-dataset challenges through semantic chunking and metadata-driven indexing. Also has hands-on orchestration experience with Airflow and Azure Data Factory, plus a pragmatic approach to LLM evaluation and stakeholder-driven iteration.”

Lenny Lin

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in cloud, distributed systems, and LLM apps

Champaign, IL3y exp

“Built and owned a hackathon project (Gritto) with a Python/FastAPI backend that routes user text through a sequence of Gemini agents to produce structured JSON outputs. Has hands-on production deployment experience using Docker/Docker Compose, GitHub Actions CI/CD, AWS App Runner, MongoDB, and secrets management (Doppler + migration to AWS Secrets Manager), plus implemented a chat-like experience via multiple HTTP requests when SSE wasn’t viable.”

“Built and deployed an AI-driven expense categorization workflow integrating OpenAI API and PGVector to automate general ledger coding. Stands out for combining LLM/embedding architecture with finance operations context, stakeholder-facing deployment ownership, and measurable impact of roughly 30%+ reduction in manual coding effort.”

Rohit Vibhu Channananjundarya

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in distributed systems and full-stack platforms

Chicago, IL6y exp

“Engineer who treats AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for judgment, with hands-on experience using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Codex across planning, coding, testing, and review. Particularly notable for building a multi-agent PR review system that automated summarization, risk scanning, schema validation, and test suggestions, helping the team shift reviewer time toward architecture and business logic.”

“Founder building Hubub, a digital concierge startup that automates business client entertainment workflows from reservations and ticketing to CRM updates and expense reporting. They have a business plan, 500 beta users, positive traction around event discovery, and are exploring a partnership with a major credit card company while prioritizing compliance and expense features next.”

“Built a production multi-agent LLM system at Live Nation on Databricks (LangGraph/LangChain) that let venue/event teams ask questions in Slack, auto-generated optimized route schedules, and produced inventory/stocking recommendations from historical SQL data and venue trends. Improved reliability by tightening prompts with strict JSON schemas, providing sample questions/SQL, and adding guardrails plus synthetic/edge-case testing, while iterating with event managers and senior VPs via prototypes and feedback loops.”