hi, i'm laura

currently a first-year student at mit. looking for things to do over the summer!

hackMIT co-director
frequent goose-watcher at goose park by bu bridge
current classes: 6.1220 design & analysis of algorithms, 18.600 probability & random variables, 6.390 intro ml, 6.101 fundamentals of programming, 24.09 minds & machines
i have a lot of ideas & in-progress projects. reach out if you're curious!

hackathon projects

w caden, harry, sania @ treehacks 2026. reimagining llm chatbot interfaces

w brian, maggie, wayne @ nexhacks 2026. extension for codebase understanding & visualization

before 2025 misc. awards
AIME qualifier '23 and '24. 8th place in NACLO (computational linguistics open) '24. National Latin Exam 5x gold.
2023 - 2025 Research Intern @ Stony Brook University Geosystems Engineering Lab
Designed a physical lab-scale model for simulating ice floes suitable for photoelastic analysis. Author on abstract at AGU '23, '24, '25. MATLAB & AutoCAD.
2024 Research Intern @ Stony Brook University Garcia Center
Studied effects of nanofillers on charged polymer systems via molecular dynamics simulations. LAMMPS & Python.

i'm on an eternal quest to find the best yogurt
i enjoy solving various kinds of cryptography puzzles. i can solve spanish xenocrypts despite 0 knowledge of spanish
back when i did science olympiad in hs, i got 1st pl in "write-it do-it" 4x, including ny states. maybe i was born to be a prompt engineer
the keyboard below shows what colors I think musical notes correspond to. reach out if you want to find out about letters and numbers too!

lauralz [at] mit [dot] edu
lzhang25 [dot] lz [at] gmail [dot] com
@laurabuild