Aryan Keluskar

Aryan Keluskar credits Arizona State University’s research opportunities, technology community and access to internships, hackathons and conferences with helping shape his path as an engineer.

“ASU has opened many doors for me,” says Keluskar, an honors student studying computer science. “The opportunities for tech internships, hackathons and conferences such as NeurIPS turned out to be crucial in my path toward becoming an engineer.”

Keluskar chose computer science because he was drawn to using mathematics to make sense of complex, ambiguous systems.

“It also enables me to turn that curiosity and ideas into real tools,” he says.

He says people often misunderstand the field as being only about coding apps or “making ChatGPT wrappers.”

“What they miss is how deeply interdisciplinary it is,” Keluskar says. “I want people to know that a computer science degree at ASU is about engineering clarity from chaos, with several opportunities to apply computer science concepts in areas such as motorsports or satellite development.”

Hackathons became “aha” moments for Keluskar. He received travel grants to participate in HackMIT and Stanford University’s TreeHacks, where he moved from raw ideas to prototypes that real users adopted and loved.

“It made me realize that engineering is all about turning curiosity into impact,” he says.

In all, he had five winning performances in collegiate hackathons, including a HackMIT sponsor prize, two TreeHacks track wins and a first-place overall finish in the HKD Code-a-thon.

At ASU’s Biodesign Institute, Keluskar worked as a machine learning research software engineer, helping reduce GPU costs and training-time bottlenecks in protein language models. In the Data Mining and Machine Learning Lab, he researched how modern AI systems handle ambiguity in input text, work that resulted in an IEEE BigData research paper. He was also a co-author on a Nature Methods research paper.

During an internship, Keluskar built a HIPAA-compliant retrieval-augmented generation system and an AI-powered voice agent that now handles more than 10,000 queries daily. At TreeHacks, he built Jiggle Wiggle, an AI movement coach that provides real-time feedback while people practice workouts and dance routines.

After graduation, Keluskar will work as a software engineer in San Francisco. Long term, he hopes to contribute to safe, personal and trustworthy AI systems, including guardrails and multimodal agents that accelerate discovery in biology and medicine.

His advice to students considering engineering is to build technical skills, but also step away from the screen.

“In an increasingly AI-native world, be ready to go analog,” he says. “Think about systems on whiteboards before ChatGPT.”

Favorites

Band:The Neighborhood
Movie: The Imitation Game
TV show: Brooklyn 99
Book: The Beginning of Infinity by Daphne du Maurier
Geeky possession: A Torch from PyTorch

Read about other exceptional graduates of the Fulton Schools’ spring 2026 class.

Written by Joe Kullman