Yash Parikh

Del Norte High School

• GPA 4.00 unweighted, 4.44 weighted.
• Highest coursework: AP Computer Science A, AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C: Mechanics; AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism and AP Statistics in progress.
• Computer science pathway (Open Coding Society): CS & Software Engineering, AP CS Principles, AP CS A, and the Project Lead the Way Capstone (in progress).

MiraCosta College

MATH 260, Calculus and Analytic Geometry III (in progress). Also hold credit for CS 111 (Introduction to Computer Science I: Java) and CS 113 (Basic Data Structures and Algorithms), earned by exam.

University of California San Diego

4.0 GPA. Python and Mathematics for Machine Learning (CSE-90162), Machine Learning Algorithms (CSE-90160), Deep Neural Networks (CSE-90161).

Institute for Emerging CORE Methods in Data Science, UC San Diego

Selective NSF-funded summer program in probability, graph theory, calculus and linear algebra, taught by faculty from UC San Diego, UCLA, UPenn and UT Austin.

Boston University Security Lab (SeclaBU), RISE

Boston, MA · Advisors: Prof. Gianluca Stringhini, Prof. Manuel Egele · Supervisor: Khosro Moeini · VibeAuthBench repo

• Conceived and built VibeAuthBench (VAB), a benchmark that measures the vulnerabilities and misconfigurations AI coding agents introduce when adding a feature (Sign-In with Google) to existing open-source applications with Python, Go and Node.js backends.
• Designed a two-stage pipeline: functional verification of the sign-in flow, then an LLM-as-judge security review against OWASP and Google OAuth guidelines, scored with CVSS 4.0 weights.
• Served open-weight models (up to 480B parameters) with vLLM on BU's Shared Computing Cluster across 30 runs. Agents produced a working sign-in in only 5 of 30 runs; 163 of 172 security findings were introduced by the new code, and security varied by language.
• Presented at the BU RISE Symposium (Aug 2026); poster accepted at IEEE ACSAC 2026. Selected as one of 85 interns from 3,800+ applicants (2.2%).

San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego

San Diego, CA · Supervisor: Dr. Martin Kandes · hpcgpt-cli

• Building AI agents that help researchers perform supercomputer operations (e.g., loading environment modules, writing job scripts).
• Analyzing agent metrics such as token usage, task success, and the impact of modifying system privileges.

San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego (REHS)

San Diego, CA · Mentor: Dr. Martin Kandes

• Benchmarked rule-based (Presidio), custom spaCy NER and LLM-based detection of personally identifiable information across 1,400+ annotated supercomputer support tickets on a 7-person research team.
• Built an AI-assisted labeling tool to identify and redact PII in support tickets.

COSMOS, UC Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, CA · Mentors: Prof. Alvaro Cardenas, Prof. Leilani Gilpin · project write-up

• Developed a systematic testing framework identifying vulnerabilities in LLM-based autonomous drone safety decisions under adversarial weather conditions.
• Built an automated simulation pipeline testing 200 scenarios against FAA Part 107 regulations, finding 75% decision inconsistency in moderate weather conditions.

Independent research, with Mihir Bapat

paper

• Designed a two-stage framework: an LSTM that flags malicious V2X message sequences (96.26% accuracy, ROC-AUC 0.976) and a Transformer that classifies 19 attack types (88.23% accuracy, 88.05% F1, up from a 70.81% baseline) using physics-based, vehicle-independent features.
• Split all data by vehicle so no vehicle appears in both training and testing, and built a sequential processor that classifies messages as they arrive (93.93% recall), with a ~142 KB model sized for vehicle onboard units.
• Co-first author, IEEE ICCNCT 2026 (pp. 273–278). 1st Award, Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair; qualifier, California Science & Engineering Fair (2026).

Air & Space Forces Association

1st place in the nation's largest youth cybersecurity competition, and voted MVP by my 6-person team as the domain-controller security lead against live professional red-team attacks.

Air & Space Forces Association

Back-to-back national championships in the CyberPatriot Middle School Division, in 7th and 8th grade. I captained the 2023 team.

National University & NDIA

High School Division champion (2026) and Middle School Division champion (2022, 2023); 2nd in the High School Division in 9th grade.

Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair

First Award in the Computer Science category for the V2X intrusion-detection project, which went on to qualify for the state fair and be published at IEEE ICCNCT.

California Science & Engineering Fair

Qualified for the state science fair with the V2X intrusion-detection project.

iGEM

Gold Medal as Software VP and wiki developer. Del Norte was the only high school in San Diego to win Gold that year.

MITRE

2nd in the high school division and top 30 overall in our first season (2024); top 50 overall in our second (2025).

National Merit Scholarship Corporation

Semifinalist in the 2027 National Merit Scholarship Program.

CyberAegis

Leadership award, received in 9th grade and again in 12th grade.

CyberAegis

Gold-level award for volunteer service hours.

College Board

Awarded for scores across multiple AP exams, after both 10th and 11th grade.

DECA

Top 8 in California in Marketing Team Decision Making (2023–24, 2025–26); 1st place in SoCal, Marketing Communication Series (2025–26).

League tournaments

Two bronze medals at league parliamentary debate tournaments.

Del Norte High School

School award; students are nominated by teachers.

CyberAegis

• Lead a student-run cybersecurity training program for 100+ middle and high school students across 3 schools.
• Architect training environments of 7–8 interconnected Windows and Linux systems for live red vs. blue team exercises, and teach blue-team incident response for Active Directory/LDAP, DNS, IIS/Apache and SQL services.
• Design internal practice competitions (ICCs) with automated scoring engines that award points for mitigating real vulnerabilities.
• Conduct live red-team operations during training sessions, simulating pentest-level attacks to prepare defenders for competition.
• Train Windows team leads on VM creation, realistic vulnerability injection, and scoring-engine development.
• President's Volunteer Service Award (Gold); Eisenhower Award for Inspired Leadership (twice).

Poway Unified School District — Open Coding Society

• Configured cloud workspaces providing Ubuntu, Kali Linux and Debian VMs for 200+ students without personal computers, including DNS migration and SSL/TLS management.
• Deployed and configured KASM cloud workspaces providing Ubuntu, Kali Linux, and Debian VMs for 20-30 concurrent students, enabling equitable access to development tools for students without personal computers.
• Executed full DNS migration across 25-30 production subdomains from a legacy domain to opencodingsociety.com using AWS Route 53, managing SSL/TLS certificates via Certbot while maintaining HTTPS functionality for 200+ student users.
• Built Python scripts for bidirectional data migration between local development and production AWS EC2 instances, implementing access controls to prevent unauthorized data extraction or malicious injection.
• Led a 5-person engineering team as primary technical liaison, coordinating infrastructure development using sprint-based agile methodology and training 8 district teachers (16 hours) on production-grade workflows including Flask, Spring, Docker, and GitHub.
• Configured cross-platform development environments (macOS, Windows/WSL, KASM) with VSCode, Jupyter kernels for Python/JavaScript/Java, and Git integration, creating setup documentation for diverse student hardware.

MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF)

• Leading my team's first- and second-time participation in MITRE's national Embedded Capture The Flag competition, managing recruitment of high school students and coordinating technical/operational aspects.
• Developing embedded systems security expertise through firmware development in C on ARM Cortex-M4 (MAX78000 Microcontroller) hardware, implementing cryptographic protections and key management under strict memory and timing constraints.
• Applying red team/blue team methodology by designing secure systems to defend against supply-chain attacks, firmware tampering, and side-channel exploits while meeting performance requirements (<150ms response times).
• 2nd Place, High School Division, and Top 30 overall (2024); Top 50 overall (2025).

Del Norte iGEM

• Built and maintain the team's research wiki and dev tools as Software VP and wiki developer.
• Continuing as Software VP and wiki developer for the 2026 season.
• Team won a Gold Medal at the 2025 iGEM Competition — the only high school in San Diego to do so.

CyberCEO (Cyber Community Education Outreach)

• Taught digital and cyber safety to 1,600+ elementary school students and 50 senior citizens across San Diego through classroom and assembly presentations.
• As Director of Outreach, work with teachers, principals and senior-home administrators to schedule workshops; as VP, help write new curriculum and keep members engaged.
• Started as Secretary (9th–10th grade) and was promoted into leadership.

Open Coding Society AI Initiative

• Co-founded and co-lead the initiative with Nikhil Maturi; organized 50 students into 8 mentored project teams with 12+ volunteer industry mentors.
• Wrote 9 grant applications (more in progress) requesting up to $60,000 for hardware and student projects; first award: $1,000 in Cohere API credits.

CyberPatriot training

• Paid CyberPatriot training, about 4 hrs/week over 3 months, for 2 students who placed 3rd in the Middle School Division semifinals.

Del Norte High School

• Selected as one of 20 of ~620 students through teacher nominations, an application and an interview.
• Visit elementary and middle schools across Poway Unified to share the program's character pillars: strong character, commitment to academics, and staying substance-free.

Del Norte Speech & Debate; Oak Valley Middle School

• Competed in parliamentary debate for 3 years (2024–2026), earning 2 bronze medals at league tournaments.
• Coached parliamentary debate for Oak Valley Middle School students (Mar 2025 – Jun 2026).

DECA

• Top 8 in California, Marketing Team Decision Making (2023–24 and 2025–26).
• 1st place, SoCal, Marketing Communication Series (2025–26).

Russian School of Mathematics; Math Olympiad volunteer

• Paid mathematics tutor and previously class assistant at the Russian School of Mathematics, teaching problem-solving across multiple levels.
• Volunteer Math Olympiad tutor for a nearby elementary school, held Wednesday mornings.

Del Norte CS Tutoring Club

• Founded the club as one of the more experienced CS students after teacher turnover left classes struggling to keep pace.
• Worked with the CS teacher to run office-hours and lunchtime sessions for struggling classmates.

Self-initiated; led a team of 5

live demo

• Developed (and led a team of 5) a full-stack web application optimizing 2 US-Mexico port of entry crossings using machine learning predictions and real-time data integration.
• Engineered Random Forest and Decision Tree models trained on historical CBP data to predict traffic wait times with real-time and long-term prediction modes.
• Built a Flask REST API with 50+ endpoints on AWS EC2, implementing JWT authentication, SQLAlchemy ORM, and an automated ML model retraining pipeline.
• Integrated live CBP API, NOAA weather data, Google Maps directions, and custom timelapse video generation from border camera feeds.