Thelonious Cooper | LinkedIn | Github | GScholar
Who's page is this?
Hi, I'm Thelonious Cooper: a human, artist, and engineer. I got my B.S. in Electrical Science & Engineering from MIT in 2025 and am currently in the EECS PhD program at UC Berkeley. I seek to affect positive change in the world by leveraging my knowledge of mathematical modeling and hardware/software engineering to innovate across scales in the fields of embedded control, communication, and sensing.Outside of work, I love making and listening to music. I spend time playing jazz and funk music on bass and guitar in jam sessions with my friends. I also enjoy pencil drawing and long rambling conversations with anyone of shared interest.Interests and Accolades
I want to center my work on tangible systems for large-scale human benefit centered on those in need. I have broad interests lying at the intersection of applied mathematics and cybernetic systems. I strive develop new methodologies for sensing and actuation under uncertainty alongside secure digital hardware platforms tailored to such applications. My full-stack knowledge and experiences from Math
At UC Berkeley I am a member of Intelligent and Quantum Photonics Group. I work on ultra-low power implementations of machine learning inference and training on photonic circuits. Upon acceptance to the EECS PhD program I was awarded one of three UC Berkeley Chancellor's Fellowship across the incoming doctoral class for outstanding academic achievement.
During my time at MIT I was named an Arts Scholar for engagement in the visual and performing arts community. In 2024 I was awarded the title of MIT Climate Grand Challenges Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar for my work in the SuperUROP program. I have served on the Undergraduate Advisory Group for the Schwartzman College of Computing, interfacing directly with leading faculty in MIT EECS and the SCC to advocate for undergraduates. I have also served academic chair for Chocolate City, a living group of underrepresented men of color in STEM
Skills ⚒️
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Embedded Systems Engineering in C/C++ and Rust
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Applied Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning in Julia and Python (PyTorch)
Applied Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning in Julia and Python (PyTorch)
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Digital Hardware Development in SystemVerilog and BlueSpec
Research Endeavors 🎓
PHD STUDENT • UC BERKELEY EECS. • AUG 2025 - ...
- Working with professor Zaijun Chen to develop integrated photonic devices and algorithms for real time data processing and sensor-fusion applications.
- Establishing frameworks and architectures for reliable and provably safe cybernetic systems.
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCHER • MIT RLE COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORK GROUP • Jan 2025 – May 2025
- Worked with professor Lizhong Zheng on novel mathematical models of nonlinear dynamical systems.
- Theoretical work involving orthogonal polynomial decompositions of nonlinear state space models.
- Developed new (still unpublished) methodology for nonlinear system identification and control.
JUNIOR RESEARCH FELLOW • UC BERKELEY CENTER FOR INNOVATION IN VISION AND OPTICS (CIVO) • JUN 2024 - AUG 2024
- Designed and implemented pipeline to generate large-scale synthetic 3d scene data for computer vision applications.
- Built on the Nvidia Omniverse and IsaacLab frameworks to write a library that integrates a simulacrum of a human visual system into a 3d rendering environment.
- Trained CV models with the ability to decide where to look based on visual cues, and be able to reason about their location in the environment purely from visual data.
- Goals for the use of this project include training CV models with the ability to decide where to look based on visual cues, and be able to reason about their location in the environment purely from visual data.
ADVANCED UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCHER • MIT EARTH SIGNALS AND SYSTEMS GROUP • JAN 2022 - Jan 2025
- Developed and implemented novel methodology for the evaluation of resilience in sophisticated drone autopilots. Simulated communications failures within an RTOS embedded-linux flight stack and modeled autopilot recovery performance.
- Presented at PX4 Developer Summit in 2023. Recorded talk available below
PX4-DevSummit YouTube - Published first-author publication detailing methods in 2024 IEEE International Conference on Unmanned Aerial Systems where I served as reliability systems program co-chair.
IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore - Created novel PyTorch implementation of Informative Ensemble Kalman Learning, a variant of Gaussian Process Regression and Markov-chain Monte Carlo, to optimize climate models and forecast extremes for risk assessment. Results were not submitted for publication but are available on this page: IEKL.pdf
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCHER • MIT CSAIL HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION ENGINEERING GROUP • FEB 2022 – SEP 2022
- Completed OpenCV C++ application to decode camera feed of a laser cut object into a message.
- Wrote a javascript interface to embed spatial codes into the joints of laser cut structures in SVG format.
- Implemented ArUco marker tracking on Infrared Cameras on Microsoft HoloLens for lightweight object tracking in AR.
- Bypassed Android hardware restriction to access Infrared camera on phone.
Engineering Experiences ⚙️
FIRMWARE/FEATURES INTERN • CISCO MERAKI • MAY 2023 – AUG 2023
- Worked in an embedded Linux environment to implement the BGP routing stack within the next generation firmware for the Meraki MX routing security appliance.
- Integrated legacy C software into a modern C++ development environment.
- Performed extensive integration testing in proprietary Python-based test environment and unit tests in Google's C++ GTest framework.
- Gained experience in an AGILE production environment with rigorous code review.
- Achieved an outstanding performance evaluation.
FIRMWARE DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANT • ELEMIND TECHNOLOGIES INC • JUN 2022 – AUG 2022
- Implemented communication and control codes in C++ for a closed-loop EEG monitoring and stimulation device which was used in Neuroscience studies.
Highlighted Personal Projects 🎨
VitalVault - 2025
VitalVault is a free and open-source project I started which is dedicated to the secure storage and easy retrieval of medical documents. Written in Rust and React Native, it implements file storage and document retrieval across languages and contexts via LLM semantic embedding run natively on one's mobile device.
Bespoke.pdf - 2024
Individual thesis project for a graduate course in Digital Integrated Systems taken during my undergrad at MIT.
Bespoke is a compiler for synthesizing FPGA stream processors from 8-bit quantized neural network specifications.
saving-castaway-bob.pdf - 2024
MIT 18.354 Nonlinear Dynamics: Continuum Systems individual final project.
This paper is a playful exploration and derivation of Kalman filtering and computational fluid simulation.
INFINITE MAGAZINE - 2023
I served on the board and designed the website for MIT's undergraduate-produced fashion magazine.
RustyDigitalPitchFollower - 2023
Multithreaded Rust app to convert an audio stream into a midi stream to trigger external synthesizers.
vocal-timbre-transfer.pdf - 2022
21M.080 individual Final Project. Using ML to style transfer vocal timbre via differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) in tensorflow.
WebGL-Julia - 2021
WebGL fragment shader which renders the Mandelbrot and Julia Sets
RPiStream - 2018
This is a simple library for losslessly streaming compressed video in real-time
copyright 2025 Thelonious Cooper