Amy YangEngineering
Engineering projects
As a kid, I was always getting in trouble for taking apart pens and anything else I could get my hands on, just to see how they worked. I've never stopped wanting to understand why and how things work. With technology moving so fast, that curiosity turned into wanting to understand it and how to use it to make people's lives better.
Village
When someone is sick, grieving, or just had a baby, people want to help, but organizing it over group texts gets messy fast! Village gives everyone one place to post tasks, claim them, and schedule events. There's various privacy settings to ensure villages can be as public or private as users want.
- Co-built the React 19 and Vite front end
- Designed the Postgres schema with Row Level Security so each village's data is only visible to its members
- Set up Supabase Auth and real-time subscriptions
- Wireframes in Figma, deployed on Vercel
Lab pipelines
Bioinformatics and computational genomics
- Adaptive-sampling pipeline to size C9orf72 repeat expansions from Nanopore reads
- Single-cell mitochondrial heteroplasmy lineage tracing
- Allele-specific expression in bulk RNA-seq
- Somatic mutation and copy-number profiling
Servo-driven robotic hand
A 3D-printed hand that copies whatever your hand does, in real time.
- Camera tracks hand landmarks at 30 fps with MediaPipe
- ESP32 drives the servos
- Force-sensitive resistors on the fingertips detect slips from the rate of change of force, after a conductance calibration
Checkersbot
Teaching a Sawyer robot arm to play checkers against humans.
- Fabricated the gripper and laser-cut board
- Computer vision to read the board state
- Move-recommendation engine and the ROS communication to execute moves, including captures
Build-your-own-world game engine
- CS 61B final project, in Java
- Procedurally generated rooms and hallways on a 2D tile grid
- Movable avatar and heads-up display
- Save and load by replaying keypress sequences deterministically
EnableTech gait walker
- Led a team of seven building a gait walker for a local resident
- Designed the 3D-printed parts in Fusion 360
- Ran weekly meetings with the team and project partner
Analyzing joint forces
- Biomechanics course project, in Python
- Modeled peak vertical and horizontal reaction forces at the knee and ankle across the running stride from individual runner data
- Combined mechanical and mathematical models to inform joint replacement design
Skills