Hello!

It's lovely to meet you. I'm Laura, and I study electrical engineering and business at University of Pennsylvania's Jerome Fisher program in Management and Technology.

I'm currently interested in chip design, and I just spent four months designing and taping out my first IC, a passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, from scratch. (The chip is currently being manufactured by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company; check back in a few months for results.) I'm also interested in telling stories and exploring the wide range of human experiences through journalism: I'm an editor at 34th Street Magazine, where I've reported on college effective altruists, the history of campus statues, and Philly's independent art scene.

I was born in Hangzhou, China, next to the beautiful, shimmering West Lake, but I spent most of my formative years in Toronto, Canada. In the past, I worked on quantum algorithms research and software development at Zapata Quantum (formerly Zapata Computing); I discovered my love for engineering early on through tinkering with code. I've participated in and/or mentored at several talent camps for quantitatively minded students, like M&TSI, SPARC, WARP, and the Atlas Fellowship; these days, I still help out from time to time.

I'm happy to talk more about any of these experiences if you reach out! You can find me at lanruo [at] upenn [dot] edu.

Until next time,