AISHA OPALUWA

I'm an AI researcher and engineer at CMU, currently working as a Research Assistant. My work sits at the intersection of NLP systems, model evaluation, and computational materials science, with a consistent thread of caring whether things actually work and being able to demonstrate why. That means evaluation design, interpretability, and building frameworks that surface failure modes before deployment.

I TA'd Introduction to Deep Learning at CMU, which sharpened a conviction that explaining something clearly is how you know you understand it. That shows up in how I build: not just accuracy, but where models break, and why.

With five years experience building production software — privacy-preserving AI infrastructure (FHE, MPC, blockchain), full-stack DeFi protocols on Tezos with smart contract integration, and genomics platforms, I think carefully about system design, tradeoffs, and how decisions hold up in practice.

Targeting ML/AI engineering and research roles. Also genuinely interested in human-AI interaction and AI ethics research — my computational materials science thread is a foundation for scientific ML/AI.