For Sustainable Horizons Institute (SHI), Isiaha Rodriguez is a hometown hero. The second year Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Arizona State University grew up in Desert Hot Springs in the Coachella Valley, where SHI offices are located. He was the perfect candidate for the Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP) workshop. Not only was he a National Merit Hispanic Recognition Program awardee, he is a first generation college student whose curiosity and skills outpaced the career options he knew of.
SRP is a comprehensive program designed to connect U.S. researchers and project leaders with students and faculty from all across the U.S. and its territories to encourage lasting collaborations, jump start careers, and build innovative workplace environments. Isiaha was paired with Dr. Talita Perciano Costa Leite in the AI & Learning Systems group and the Computational Biosciences group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This past summer they explored developing machine learning architectures that fuse multiple types of chemical data to help predict and guide the discovery of new catalysts.
“Being on a big team that was so interdisciplinary was really exciting,” says Isiaha. “I got to work with a statistician/applied mathematician, chemists who do bench and computational chemistry, people who are well versed in machine learning, and computer scientists. As the math person in the group, it felt very cool to have my technical expertise add to the project.” While he is now back at Arizona State, Isiaha is continuing to work with the Berkeley Lab team as they develop a Python package.
Before starting his SRP, Isaiah did not have a precise direction for his dissertation. After his SRP experience, however, he is interested in exploring machine learning, as Isiaha says, “building tools that help the broader research community and global community, and then at the same time, doing some fun, interesting math along the way.”
He is also considering a career at a national lab. “I liked the culture at Berkeley Lab,” says Isiaha. “I was given the freedom to be exploratory and throw some math at a problem, see what stuck, see what didn’t, go read, learn some more math, and then bring it back.”
His family and SHI are thrilled by his success. “They are overjoyed that I’m working with a group of people who are excited that I am also contributing,” says Isiaha.
“Being a little kid growing up in the Valley, I never in a million years thought I would be here. It feels great that SHI is also based in the Coachella Valley. It is a full circle moment for me.”