Hi, I am Laura Chirila 👋
A Computer Science 🖥️ student at Rice University 🦉, passionate about building scalable AI-powered products that solve real-world problems.
9+
Years building & deploying code
20+
Projects completed
300K+
Users impacted by products I've built
Experience
Meta
Software Engineering Intern
Menlo Park, California, United States
June 2025 - Present
Magnolia River
Data Scientist Development Intern
Decatur, Alabama, United States
December 2024 - January 2025
Magnolia River
Data Scientist Development Intern
Decatur, Alabama, United States
May 2024 - August 2024
Rice University
Research Intern
Houston, Texas, United States
November 2022 - May 2023
Sapphire Group Romania
Co-founder, CTO, Full Stack Developer
Timisoara, Timis, Romania
May 2020 - August 2022
Politehnica University Timisoara
Research Collaborator & First Author
Timisoara, Timis, Romania
August 2021 - September 2021
Timis High School Online Fair
Organizer, Manager of Web Development Department, Data Scientist
Timisoara, Timis, Romania
April 2021 - July 2021
Technologies I work with
Education
Rice University
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Minor in Data Science, Entrepreneurship
Houston, Texas, United States
Activities and societies:
Rice Electric Vehicle, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Rice Chapter, Rice Robotics Club
Colegiul National Pedagogic "Carmen Sylva"
High School Diploma, Mathematics and Computer Science Intensive
Timisoara, Timis, Romania
Activities and societies:
FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Team (#17861 CSH), Zero Robotics heRObotics Team, Peda Game Development Club Co-founder & Mentor, CSH Academy Mentor, InfoGim Software Creativity Contest Organizer
Awards and Recognitions
Rice Design-a-thon 2025
February 2025
2nd Place
OEDK Excellence in Underclassman Engineering Design Award
April 2023
Engineering Design Award
EHB Conference
November 2021
Special Prize of the Romanian Society of Medical Bioengineering
First Tech Challenge National Championship
March 2021
Motivate Award 1st Place
First Tech Challenge Regional Championship
February 2021
Inspire Award 1st Place
NEXTLAB.TECH National robotics competition
December 2020
3rd Place
Ada Lovelace Day Hack International Hackathon
October 2020
2nd Place
Challenge Accepted CODVIDHACK National Hackathon
April 2020
Popularity Prize
First Tech Challenge Regional Championship
March 2020
Inspire Award 2nd Place
iTEC National Hackathon
March 2020
1st Place in Embedded Development
Coolest Projects International
May 2019
Runner Up Hardware category
FIRST Tech Challenge National Championship
March 2019
Think Award 1st Place
Zero Robotics High School Tournament ISS
January 2019
Finalist
Climate Launchpad Global Grand Final
November 2018
Finalist
Climate Launchpad National Final
November 2018
1st Place
Research Publications
CXR-based Diagnosis of COVID-19 using Deep Learning with CycleGAN for Data Augmentation
2021 International Conference on e-Health and Bioengineering (EHB)
A generative adversarial network called CycleGAN is used for image dataset augmentation and successfully employed in transfer learning of several popular deep neural network architectures pretrained on ImageNet, to diagnose COVID-19 based on chest X-rays. The significant performance improvement of the classifiers indicates that CycleGAN is usable in the image-based diagnosis of COVID-19 when the available dataset is small or class imbalance affects the results. Therefore, it could accelerate the development of efficient tools for a fast response in rapidly changing pandemic conditions.
