Zachary is an undergraduate student (Class of 2028) in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, double majoring in computer science and music. During the 2025-26 academic year, Zach worked as a software engineer in Professor N. Rich Nguyen’s Floodwatch application, developing features that share user-sourced and user-corroborated information on potentially dangerous floods across Vietnam as they develop.
Zachary’s work during the TYDE fellowship (summer 2026) focuses on a participant-facing program that allows users to donate their data from social and AI platforms to studies on social media and LLM chatbot usage. A crucial step in the donation process is to enable users to omit any data they are uncomfortable with sharing at any point within the study, and existing platforms do not facilitate the granular exclusion of data that participants often seek.
In addition to research and academic responsibilities, Zach is an active member of UVA’s musical community and can be frequently heard playing trumpet with the Charlottesville Symphony.