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pushkal.

About

Researcher, engineer, founder.

I work at the intersection of AI research and infrastructure — building systems that are trustworthy by design, and products that turn research into leverage.

I'm an AI researcher and research intern at Washington State University, where I contribute to VALOR-RAG — a value-aware security framework for enterprise retrieval-augmented generation, currently under review at HICSS 2026. My independent research on RAG data poisoning defenses, RAGuard, has been accepted to NeurIPS and AAAI workshops, and I have a computational biology paper, Healix, under review at IEEE JBHI.

On the building side, I'm the founder of Meridian, an AI-native CRM for tutoring organizations, and I lead software on my FIRST Robotics team. I serve as Vice President of Finance for a 400+ member DECA chapter — placing 4th internationally at DECA ICDC — and won 1st place nationally in FBLA Mobile App Development.

The common thread: I build products at the intersection of AI and infrastructure, and I care about the gap between what works in a benchmark and what works in the world.

Where I've worked

Experience

  1. Building AI-native operational infrastructure for tutoring organizations.

  2. Collaborating on research involving AI systems, retrieval-augmented generation, and value creation in enterprise AI applications.

  3. Supporting fundraising initiatives, social media growth, and nonprofit operations.

  4. Lead the software subteam: vision, autonomous routines, and controls.

Teams & communities

Leadership

DECA

Vice President of Finance

  • Lead within a 400+ member chapter
  • Manage financial operations for the chapter
  • Placed 4th internationally at DECA ICDC in the Finance Operations Research Event

FBLA

National Champion

  • 1st Place, Mobile App Development — FBLA National Leadership Conference
  • Designed, built, and presented a production mobile app under competition constraints

FIRST Robotics

Software Lead

  • Own the robot software stack: vision, autonomous, controls
  • Mentor and onboard new programmers each season

TEDxNorthCreek

Selected Speaker

  • Selected speaker delivering a public talk through TEDxNorthCreek

Independent Tutor

Tutor

  • Provided math and computer science tutoring

Tools & methods

Skills

Programming

7
PythonJavaTypeScriptReactNodeC++SQL

AI / ML

6
PyTorchTensorFlowTransformersRAGHugging FaceOpenCV

Research

4
Experimental DesignAblationsLiterature ReviewScientific Writing

Infrastructure

6
DockerGitREST APIsPostgreSQLOAuthRBAC

Beyond the work

Basketball ·Reading AI papers ·Startups ·Teaching ·Building products