I build for how people actually think.

I grew up in Chengthi, in Panchagarh, where the roads to my elementary school were at any given time either broken or under knee-deep water. There were no uniforms, no school bags, no electricity, and no up-to-date syllabi. Most of my classmates worked their family's farmland after school. My parents never asked me to do chores, which is a small thing that turns out to be everything: it left me time to be curious. When we moved to Thakurgaon, I still had none of what city kids had — no special schools, no mentors, no computers — but I had a public library, and that was enough of a door.

I found programming in that library, in Tamim Shahariar Subeen's “Computer Programming.” I had no device to compile or run anything, so I wrote code by hand, in ink, and on paper, with no way to test it. Despite uncertainty about my own work plaguing me occasionally, my curiosity could barely be dented. In 8th grade I finally got a laptop and internet — a 25-gigabyte monthly package that cost 1,800 taka, about one-twelfth of my mother's salary — and I wrung dry every resource it gave me: Paul McWhorter's robotics tutorials, GitHub, microcontrollers, whatever I could reach.

What followed was a long string of countdowns. RoboSics, a robotics team I co-founded because my hands were too shaky to solder well and I needed seniors who could. NASA's Human Exploration Rover Challenge, where I led the electrical R&D — until the competition was called off two days before our flight, and COVID took the dream and a lot more besides. I was bedridden for months. To not succumb to the helplessness, the team and I built an affordable ventilator for coronavirus patients. Of course, to keep with history, I kept working.

The real reorientation came at Rose-Hulman, where I was diagnosed with ADHD. Getting treated — and watching large language models arrive at the same time — pointed all my old questions at a new target. I was still a builder, but now I wanted to understand the thing doing the building: attention, motivation, memory, why two people given identical instructions end up in different places. So I started building software and hardware that take how people actually think and decide seriously — grounded in cognitive-science papers, not vibes, and using AI tools to move faster than I could alone.

I cross disciplines on purpose. I don't just want to be an engineer, an astronaut, or a rocket scientist — I want every path that helps me understand the universe and the minds inside it. Essentially, I aspire to take leisurely walks with my dog across Martian landscapes, and I plan to work toward a reality where that sounds mundane rather than impossible.