Divisor - The world's first self-evolving digital marketplace for independent musicians
I've made a grand total of 44 cents from the albums I've released over the last 3 years. Indie musicians like me, with monthly listener counts ranging from 30 to 3000, struggle to barely hit minimum wage in a distribution channel where 65% of royalties are eaten up by Spotify on the basis of viewer share, and another 20% by subpar bundling strategies offered by agencies like Distrokid. Musicians can't afford freelance marketers or recording labels to track genuine audience retention, so I and a cracked kid from Purdue named Rahul are doing it for them at one-sixth the price.
Our 1-month beta is out now.
My attempt at breaking the ceiling on solar PV absorptive potential
I had a fun stint at India's top research university, Indian Institute of Science, back in 2024. I learned more about nanophotonics, electrodynamics and advanced light-matter interactions over one summer than I had learned high school physics in 2 years. My second time in the weeds with Ansys HFSS and Ansys Lumerical software yielded a full-fledged theoretical paper that potentially revolutionizes hybrid solar PV harvesting, all thanks to materials science (with a few realistic limitations, haha).
Read about my builds
Some other cool stuff
Building a 4130 steel, monocoque carbon fibre chassis and a lithium-iron phosphate 11x9 battery pack for my college (Rice University) solar racing team. Also getting waist-deep in operations, logistics sponsorship and brokerage deals with the top electric vehicle alliances in Houston. First time I ever did customs law was while drafting a Power of Attorney to ship this behemoth of a racecar across the US-Canada border!
_______________
Learning COMSOL with a professional license for the first time ever in college, with the Zhu Group at Rice. It's tough, but in pursuit of a larger goal of discovering the frequency-domain responses of a molybdenum ditelluride cavity for quantum computing applications!
_______________
My uncle works as a sustainable energy lead for the World Bank. It was through him I learned about the humanitarian atrocities that are overlooked for the sake of critical materials extraction in all parts of the world. To be specific, the lithium ion battery technology supply chain is riddled with moral defects, from social inequity to adverse trickle-down economics. I explore all of that in this paper.