I'm Genesis 🐙 — a data scientist at the Minnesota Star Tribune, where I build ML and AI tools to help great journalism reach the right readers. I studied Interdisciplinary Data Science at Duke and Statistics & Political Science at UCLA. I'm most at home at the intersection of data, journalism, public policy, and healthcare.
I grew up in Nanjing, China and Portland, Oregon 🌲. I love using data and code to tell stories, help journalist understand their readers better and enable newsrooms to grow and connect with their audience. I'm passionate about journalism, music, pottery, and reading.
I double majored at UCLA 🐻, applying data science to analyze and catalyze social good.
I fell in love with journalism — reporter, editor, then EIC. I ran and won on a platform to improve diversity in the newsroom and its coverage.
I used data science to support the center's legal team defending voting rights in Washington, New York, and Kansas.
After two summers at H&R Block learning ML/DevOps, I came to Duke to go deeper on MLOps, Deep Learning, and Data Engineering.
I build bespoke ML and AI solutions to put great journalism in front of more readers and help the publisher navigate the digital media landscape.
I organize the Minnesota chapter's annual trivia bowl and other events connecting Asian American journalists across the state.
I joined the News Product Management Certification program's fifth cohort to sharpen my product and leadership skills from industry leaders changing news with technology.
I picked up pottery and love the meditative rhythm of the wheel. See what I've been making on my pottery studio page.
A mix of machine learning, data engineering, computer vision, and civic tech — built at Duke, UCLA, hackathons, and the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Machine Learning · News
A multi-touch attribution model and Negative Binomial Regression framework that measures which stories convert readers into subscribers — giving Minnesota Star Tribune editors a principled, business-aligned view of story performance.
NLP · Audience Insights
A two-part NLP system that classifies Star Tribune articles by both topic (BERTopic) and story format (spaCy deep learning) — revealing which topic-archetype combinations are the strongest subscriber acquisition drivers.
NLP · Vision-Language
Using BLIP and ViT models to reverse the text→image relationship. Our fine-tuned BLIP model showed a 25% improvement in average cosine similarity over the zero-shot baseline.
Computer Vision · Healthcare
Used OpenCV to simulate motion artifacts and a custom Faster R-CNN model to localize tumors and determine which blur direction most impacts classification performance.
NLP · Sustainability
An image-to-text neural network that reveals the hidden electricity, water, and CO₂ costs of clothing items. Users can compare their purchases to the community and make more informed decisions.
Machine Learning · Climate
Dask-parallelized time-series model across 3,000+ cities to forecast future temperatures and understand the disproportionate global impact of climate change. Deployed as a Streamlit app and CLI tool.
Stats · Public Health
UCLA Datafest award-winning project analyzing drug overdose risk for the Rocky Mountain Poison Center. A random forest classifier found recent cannabis use to be a major predictor of high overdose risk.
Civic · Political Science
County-level analysis using ARDA data to understand whether the presence of predominantly African American churches strengthens Black voter turnout in the South.
Click on the slides below to read some of the stories I wrote and those that were written about me during my time at the Daily Bruin. As the first person of color to take charge of the newsroom in almost a decade, I was able to bring a new perspective to the newsroom and the stories we told. Photo credits to the incredible photographers at The Bruin, their names are in the stories.
Tracing back the reasons I joined the Daily Bruin, I must admit that ego was a part of it.
UCLA faculty criticize decision to let LAPD use Jackie Robinson Stadium to detain BLM protestors (Photo: Liz Ketchem)
For the third consecutive year, the Daily Bruin is reflecting on its progress toward becoming a more diverse center of journalism.
Bernie Sanders presents progressive platform to 5,200 supporters at East LA rally
Presidential candidate Klobuchar discusses domestic violence at UCLA event
The California secretary of state is working on increasing voter participation at a university event Thursday.
American public schools are increasingly segregated along the lines of race and income, a study found.
Providing hubs for students experiencing housing insecurity is only a short-term fix
Q&A: New EDI Vice Chancellor Anna Spain Bradley's goals for her upcoming term
UC Board of Regents votes to increase nonresident tuition by $762 per year
UCLA faculty discuss what mail-in voting will look like for the 2020 general election
The assistant secretary of state for public affairs encouraged students to pursue a career in the state department.