Isiaha Rodriguez grew up in Desert Hot Springs in the Coachella Valley. He is a first generation college student, but his father instilled in him the value of higher education. Isiaha took it upon himself to enroll in Rancho Mirage High School and take public transit 15 miles every day to get the best education he could. When he graduated, he received a National Merit Hispanic Recognition Program scholarship, which helped him pay for his undergraduate Applied Mathematics studies at Arizona State University (ASU).
Now he is pursuing a Ph.D. at ASU in Applied Mathematics in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences as a Presidential Graduate Fellow, and he was just matched with Dr. Talita Perciano Costa Leite in the AI & Learning Systems group and the Computational Biosciences group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory through Sustainable Horizon Institute’s Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP) workshop.
“Having the opportunity to be able to hear all the cool science being done, especially in the area of machine learning, and to meet and work with people at the national labs is really exciting,” says Isiaha, whose Ph.D. research is focused on computational inverse problems with machine learning applications.
Dr. Perciano and Isiaha will be working on a project for developing new machine learning architecture to discover catalytic reactions in chemistry. “The way science is done at the national labs resonated with me–incredibly collaborative environments and long-term projects where everybody’s working to push the edge of science,” says Isiaha. “I’m really excited about and grateful for the summer internship I’m about to do.”