Seismic Inc. · ML Engineer Intern Jun–Sept 2024

Researched and deployed end-to-end rapid prototype projects with SQL-to-Text AI generation for code explainability and SQL optimization through various LLMs on Microsoft Azure and IBM Watson. Built an automated self-RAG SQL generation pipeline with SQLAlchemy, along with fullstack development using React, Snowflake, PostgreSQL/pgvectors, and Postman.

Inspirit AI · Lead Curriculum Manager & Developer May 2023–Dec 2025

Led a team of 5 developers building and debugging machine learning applications and projects. Worked with faculty and researchers from HKUST, MIT, and Stanford to build tutorials on differential privacy, object detection, reinforcement learning, LLMs, vision transformers, and more for 20,000+ high school, undergraduate students, and professionals.

Engineers 4 Exploration · Undergraduate Researcher May 2023–2024

E4E Bioacoustics, UCSD

Using vision transformers to interpolate and build synthetic avian audio data for modified CNNs with attention and ensemble learning to classify bird species from 50,000+ audio samples. Applying information theory quantifiers to estimate soundscape diversity and address domain shift.

Life Singularity Inc. · ML Research & Development Intern Aug–Dec 2022

Hypertuned and cleaned data for XGBoost Random Forest classification models using social determinants of health and over 20,000 different biomarkers with data from over 300 million patients. Built a pipeline for basic 3D modeling from Random Forest results using Babylon.js.

MIT CSAIL · External Researcher Jun–Dec 2022

App Inventor

Assisting in the implementation of API features into MIT App Inventor & maintaining the GitHub open source repository.

UCSD NIH All of Us · Researcher —

Working with the National Institute of Health via the All of Us Research Program to assist in training and evaluating logistic regression, random forests, MLP, and kNN models with cross-validation and k-fold hyperparameter optimization using Scikit-Learn to build predictive models of depression.

Approach,

or the velocity which my heart seeks

towards ataraxia Mar 2026 ▼

I spend a lot of time thinking about bringing good to the world. What does it mean to be good? It's not really much of a rational or objective definition; a debate would be immature here. Often, debates overcomplicate and ruin the heart of what things are meant to be. Rather, to keep things simple, it's a feeling. Being surrounded by a warm rhythm of smiles and contentedness. It's not too slow, nor too fast, but just enough to keep things lively.

I'm happy when my friends are happy. It's not in a people pleasing way, but it's more of a feeling of wanting to be there and help those around me; I feel anxious and not so great when they are struggling around me. It's a sort of happiness that I strive for borne of a moment free from worry — an ataraxia of sorts. Perhaps that's what 'doing good' means: whatever actions that will universally reduce the worry from everyone's hearts with the least sacrifice.

I have a silly little dream of sorts, which is why my usernames are connected to 'atlas' in some sort of way — growing up, I always wanted to create some sort of reliable bastion for my friends and people I hold dear. A whimsical, fun, safe place that has inspired so many things: subset, superset, and the dreams that I'll always work toward.

Nolan Chai

Hi, I'm Nolan. Previously, I studied Cognitive Science, Mathematics-Computer Science, and Linguistics at UC San Diego. I'm really curious about robots, language, how people think and learn, AI, and everything in between! In particular, I simply enjoy thinking of ways to build things with language that people can interact, have fun with, and benefit from.

Previously, I've worked at MIT CSAIL, Inspirit AI, Seismic Inc., the UCSD NIH All of Us Research Program, UCSD Engineers 4 Exploration, Life Singularity Inc., and TreasureHacks. I have extensive experience in MLOps, software development, project management, and automation.

Some of my interests lately include procedural generation, grounding language in language models, graph neural networks, computer vision, and modeling cognitive states using biomarkers.

Outside of work, I enjoy sketching, building games, and animating. My long term aspiration is to do meaningful ML research, working on cool and interesting ideas, and running a game studio with friends c:

nchaiedu@gmail.com · nochai@ucsd.edu · linkedin

Now

Frontier AI Lab · ML Research Engineer 2026 →

Bay Area

I am planning to indefinitely move to the Bay Area sometime during the Summer to work on some more slightly mundane tasks, but will be deeply involved as a Machine Learning Researcher at a frontier lab.

Ani.ML Health · ML Engineer Sep 2025 →

Working with Professor Kuan-Chuen Wu, Dr. Christopher Pinard, and Dharma Suarez Palacios to create new ways that we can verify and use medical data with language models for veterinarians.

LeMN Lab, UCSD · Researcher Feb 2025 →

Advised by Prof. Alex Warstadt · with TQ Zhang

Finding new ways to quantify and look at language data through the lens of UID and information theory.

People I've worked with

I've spent a lot of time throughout the years working with amazing students & friends, and I'd love to support them as much as I can. If you are a recruiter, I hope you take a look at their profiles. Here are a few memorable people I've worked with and mentored in recent times. I'll leave additional notes here whenever I get the time.

Mentees

Catherine Zhang SWE @ Capital One

Brandon Kao UCI Law School

Sophia Shetty Johns Hopkins · Neuroscience

Markus Gruendler UC San Diego · Math–CS

Zoe Xue

Friends

Sean Yen

UC San Diego · MS CS

Nick Petrone

UC San Diego · MS CS, Cybersecurity

Sean Perry

UC San Diego · PhD CS

Sam Prestrelski

ServiceNow · SWE