personal statement

Hello! I'm Saanvi, and I'm an undergraduate Caltech student studying Computer Science and Neurobiology1, while enjoying fun and thought-provoking coursework in biochemistry, philosophy, economics, and psychology, and dabbling in music, design, and writing (:P).

When I try to contextualize my diverse research interests to what I want to do in the future, I find a common thread in that I've always been a persistent (and annoying) question-asker, and I want to keep practicing this insatiably-curious mindset to understand things we don't understand. My dogmatic premise is that understanding the world is fundamental to making pertinent and impactful change2. I've enjoyed studying biology and neuroscience3 because it's fascinating to see how complex systems4 operate through computational principles—and this interpretation opens Pandora's box: if biochemistry and neuroscience are inherently programmable systems, then can we program these systems? The ability to fundamentally rewrite the world seems too OP5 and, of course, taking control of mother nature raises important ethical considerations. Despite this, I believe the positive applications to medicine, sustainability, and humanity are too exhilarating to not try, but doing so requires prudence, human-ness, and knowing when to pace the frontier6.

I was initially drawn to coding and machine learning in early high school because of the speed at which I could do stuff and make things happen, like when sixty minutes of following a Python tutorial yielded my own physics-based simulation of planetary orbits. My experiences in wet-lab biology and hands-on Arduino-building was enlightening, yet this hunger for fast-moving progress drove an early preference towards data analysis and algorithmic design. During my summer internships with the Seattle Children's Research Institute and Stanford Medicine department of radiology, I fell in love with the rate of progress I could identify genes corresponding to cancerous cell trajectories and build lesion segmentation and ground-truth annotation software to aid busy brain radiologists. Science allows us to mechanistically understand the world, and technology, especially superintelligence and machine learning, fractionates the time and manual labor it takes to make impactful discoveries and solutions by insanity orders of magnitude.

My ultimate goal is to be at the forefront of this marriage and do work I and future generations would be proud of.

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  1. process of elimination honestly- caltech humbled my initial plans of being a physics or ee major, cns was too broad, …
  2. rephrased- we need to understand something before we can push change, and this applies to everything.
  3. how does life occur? what is consciousness? why do we get sick? why do we dream? how did life begin? how do we think? why do we age? what is intelligence? how does evolution work? how do we remember? why do we die? what makes us self-aware? how do cells communicate? why do we forget? what makes something alive? how do we perceive reality? why do organisms reproduce? what creates emotions? how does dna encode life? how do we make decisions? why do mutations happen? what is the self? how do organisms adapt? why do we sleep? how do proteins fold? how do we learn? why does cancer occur? what is a thought? how do cells know what to become? how does the brain create meaning? why do we need energy? what is imagination? how does the immune system recognize threats? why do we feel pain? what determines lifespan? how do we experience time? why does biodiversity exist? what creates curiosity? how do organisms develop? what is attention? why do cells die? how does memory shape identity? how do genes control behavior? why do we have emotions? what determines biological complexity? how does the brain predict the future? why do species go extinct? what makes us creative? how does regeneration work? why do we hallucinate? how do organisms maintain homeostasis? what is free will? why do diseases evolve? how does language emerge? what makes biological systems robust? how does the brain represent the world? why do we need oxygen? what determines personality? how do cells repair themselves? why do we fear death? what drives natural selection? how do we recognize faces? why do organisms cooperate? what creates subjective experience? how does the body distinguish self from nonself? why do we have unconscious thoughts? how does metabolism sustain life? how do beliefs form? why do organisms compete? what makes memories persist? how do biological systems organize themselves? how does the brain distinguish imagination from reality? why does life require information? what determines what we remember? how do cells interpret signals? why do we experience dreams as real? what limits evolution? how does the brain encode knowledge? why do organisms have different lifespans? what makes an experience meaningful? how does life emerge from chemistry? can consciousness exist without a brain? why is life so diverse? can intelligence exist without consciousness? how do molecules become organisms? how does neural activity become experience? can aging be reversed? can memories be transferred? can life exist without dna? can a brain understand itself? is evolution predictable? can consciousness be measured? what are the limits of biological adaptation? what are the limits of human intelligence? can we design new forms of life? can we create artificial consciousness? is there a universal principle of life? is there a universal principle of intelligence? why does life exist at all? why is there something it feels like to be alive?
  4. one could say a black-box system
  5. over-powered
  6. with this great power comes great responsibility- a certain human-arthropod chimera's relative, i think

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