About

About

def __init__(self):
    self.name = "Deena Sun"
    self.grade = "Senior"
    self.graduation_year = 2027
    self.majors = ["Electrical Engineering and Computer Science", "Business Administration"]
    self.school = "University of California, Berkeley"
Tabling for my club Machine Learning @ Berkeley during the first week of senior year"Petting" highland cows in Scotland during my semester abroad in EuropeOne of the highlights of my study abroad was getting to watch an ice hockey game at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics with my friends!I believe in sidequesting as much as possible, and got to do a lot of it while studying abroad! This is me hiking on a glass floor thrill walk in the Swiss Alps...... and this is me kayaking in the Czech Republic next to a castle built in the 13th centuryMe and Oski! Go Bears!Me and my team at the 2025 Berkeley AI HackathonTaking point-fives at the Arc de Triomphe with my mom and my brotherRushing the field after Cal won the Big GameMunching on a tomato bagel from Apollo BagelsPosing with my penguin buddy at the New York City Central Park ZooSeeing the Endeavour space shuttle at the California Science Center

Hello, I'm Deena, a 4th year undergrad at UC Berkeley studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Business Administration under the Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (M.E.T.) Program.

I'm passionate about AI interpretability, world models, and the connection between AI, human psychology, and neuroscience.

In my free time, I like to explore new hobbies (most recently, billiards and poker), plan my next backpacking trip (hopefully the Camino de Santiago, Dolomites, or Peru soon), and read. I love dinosaurs and space!

Thanks for visiting my portfolio. I look forward to sharing more of my moonshots with you!

What I'm currently up to...

  • AI Engineer at Hex: making magic as Hex's first intern! I worked on recursively improving agents, online evals, Hex's agent harness, and training signal classifiers
  • CS 189/289 Teaching Assistant: teaching CS 189/289 (Introduction to Machine Learning) at Berkeley on the content, discussion, and exam teams
  • Machine Learning @ Berkeley Research and External Officer: planning hackathons, career fairs, workshops, and more with Machine Learning @ Berkeley, UC Berkeley's premier machine learning organization
  • Accel Scholar: exploring the startup and broader tech world alongside a small, tight-knit community of fellow scholars and mentors

Experience

  • Researcher at Berkeley AI Research: produced mechanistic interpretability research to measure, analyze, and steer ambiguity in LLMs
  • Researcher at Stanford AI Laboratory: engineered RL environments to study how frontier AI will shape the future of cybersecurity
  • Uber AI Solutions Software Engineering Intern: launched a contextual search engine leveraging CLIP image-text models, KNN algorithms, and vector databases that let clients search over 100k+ images using natural language
  • VectorShift Software Engineering Intern: implemented LLMOps evaluations platform and revamped marketplace, spurring a 230% growth in daily active users over a month
  • Project Manager for Venture Strategy Solutions/Power My Analytics: led a team of 7 consultants to implement an AI coding agent with a test-driven ReAct approach to accelerate the development of new 3rd-party connectors for Power My Analytics
  • Software Developer for Blueprint/Alliance for Clean Energy New York: built and deployed an automated webscraper on Google Cloud to collect information on over 2,000 renewable energy projects in New York for a public web app with a searchable map, filters, and data aggregation
  • Berkeley SkyDeck Technical Intern: automated 250+ office hour sign-ups, mentor matchings, and event RSVPs using scripts to save 80+ hours/week for program admins
  • Consultant for Venture Strategy Solutions/BetterUp: coded an auditing dashboard to extract data on 600 courses and provide LLM-powered insights to improve learner outcomes for 4,000+ coaches