About
Aboutme
How I ended up doing security research as an undergraduate, what I study, and what I'm up to outside of class and the NSOC.
How I got here
I'd rather understand a thing by taking it apart.
I'm a B.S. Information Technology student on the Systems Administration track at UMass Boston, working on both sides of the same question: how systems actually fail, and how you catch it when they do.
I started out keeping a retail store's network and point-of-sale systems alive. Unglamorous work, but it taught me to isolate a failure to hardware, network, or software before touching anything, which turns out to be most of what incident triage is.
That led to the university's Network Security Operations Center, where I work the alert queue: investigating phishing reports, running vulnerability scans across campus endpoints, and writing up findings that someone more senior has to be able to act on. Earning CompTIA Network+ in October 2026 and Security+ in November 2026 put formal structure under that work.
In parallel I joined the Cyberpunk Division of UMass Boston's Machine Psychology Group as an Undergraduate Machine Psychology Fellow, red-teaming large language models. It's the same instinct pointed at a newer target: find out what a system does when you push it somewhere its designers didn't intend.
That's also why there's a rack of equipment in my house and a Flipper Zero on my desk.
Education
B.S. Information Technology
University of Massachusetts Boston, College of Science and Mathematics. Systems Administration track, expected 2028.
Coursework spanning Linux/Unix systems administration, networking, web design, and IT security, with an emphasis on hands-on labs over theory alone.
Self-assessed
Skill levels
“Excellent” means I work with it independently and can troubleshoot it. “Good” means I use it regularly and am still building depth.
| Tool or skill | Category | Level |
|---|---|---|
| LLM red-teaming (garak, PyRIT) | AI / model security | Excellent |
| Model serving and weight editing | AI / model security | Excellent |
| SIEM | Threat detection and triage | Excellent |
| Vulnerability management | Security operations | Excellent |
| EDR / XDR | Endpoint security | Good |
| Phishing and email analysis | Security operations | Excellent |
| Networking fundamentals | Network security | Excellent |
| Wireless and RF testing | Offensive security | Good |
| Linux / Bash | Systems administration | Excellent |
| Python | Scripting, tooling, and automation | Excellent |
| HPC / Slurm | Research infrastructure | Good |
| HTML / CSS / JavaScript | Web development | Excellent |
| TrueNAS / ZFS | Storage and homelab infrastructure | Excellent |
Core proficiency areas
Homelab
A walkthrough
A six-minute tour of the TrueNAS dashboard and the applications running in my lab. Captions are on by default. Read the homelab case study
Outside of work
Fitness
Working through a structured training program: diet, gym, and cardio, tracked the same way I'd track anything else.
Homelab tinkering
Most weekends involve breaking something in the homelab, then figuring out how to fix it properly rather than just fast.
Hardware and RF
Learning the physical layer the hard way: radios, badges, and USB devices, all on equipment I own.