Junior electrical engineering student. Two labs. Too many projects. Strong believer that you can be a master of some things if you move fast enough.
I'm a junior EE student at the University of Connecticut, working in integrated photonics (Prof. Wang's lab) and film measurement (Prof. Gokirmak's lab) at the same time. I also TA Circuits I and keep way too many side projects alive.
I plan on getting a PhD in EE — probably somewhere at the intersection of photonics and devices. I don't know exactly what the research question is yet, but I'm picking up the skills to find it.
Besides my research, I have a true passion for education. I think the way introductory circuits is taught leaves students performing procedures they don't understand, and I'm trying to fix that, one practice problem at a time, through circuitspractice.org.
Microring and microdisk resonators for dense wavelength-division multiplexing. Working toward designing full DWDM systems in ANSYS Lumerical to study AI accelerator power bottlenecks. The goal is photonic interconnects that move data between chips without burning the datacenter down.
I built a Python reflectance spectrometer tool that fits Fresnel interference models to OceanOptics HR2000+ spectra and extracts SiO₂ thickness on silicon. Then I changed the model to a Transfer Matrix Model, working for virtually any number of films with any thicknesses.
Throughout my experiments I've picked up a variety of skills. Here are some of the things I've used/done:
I think a lot of intro circuits instruction teaches students to execute procedures they don't understand. Too many students memorize patterns without understanding what they mean. I hope to fix that.
My approach: build intuition first, formalism second. That means repeatable practice sets designed around understanding, not rote application, with enough worked examples that a student can trace exactly where their reasoning went wrong.
All of it lives free at circuitspractice.org and on YouTube.
Research, collaborations, or someone who needs a problem solved.
Willow Valeria Pichardo · Storrs, CT · updated June 2026
Work like you're running out of time.