Work Experience
Research Assistant
University of Notre Dame
· Notre Dame, IN
Aug. 2021–Present
- Advised by Dr. Jane Cleland Huang, conducting research to create safer software systems through improved software engineering practices.
- Applied NLP techniques to improve trace link prediction and support automated software documentation.
- Developed a framework for designing more trustworthy reinforcement learning systems and generating more robust system requirements.
Research Intern
Microsoft Research
· Redmond, WA
May 2025–Aug. 2025
- Worked with the Software Analysis and Intelligence in Engineering Systems (SAINTES) group in MSR to automate differential testing for a product group.
- Developed an AI agent for differential testing with traceability to key project artifacts, enabling engineers to validate outputs and ensure trustworthy results.
- Ongoing research focuses on extending these methods beyond differential testing to broader software engineering tasks and product groups.
Co-founder | Lead Researcher
SAFA.ai
· Notre Dame, IN
Apr. 2022–Sep. 2024
- Co-founded SAFA.ai, a platform leveraging AI to improve traceability and requirements management in safety-critical systems.
- Secured an STTR Phase I grant with NASA and completed nine industry pilot projects.
- Accepted into the 2023 Techstars Los Angeles Accelerator.
Software & Systems Engineer
Lockheed Martin
· Mount Laurel, NJ
Apr. 2019–Mar. 2021
- Worked on the Aegis System at the Rotary and Mission Systems Branch.
- Contributed to the development of a Java-based backend controller that reported real-time status of ship elements to user-facing interfaces.
- Automated system-level tests with a Python framework and led refactoring to improve modularity and maintainability.
Publications & Writing
Blog Posts
1
Cross-Layer Transcoders are Incentivized to Learn Unfaithful Circuits
LessWrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6CS2NDmoLCFcEJMor/cross-layer-transcoders-are-incentivized-to-learn-unfaithful
Publications
1
Revealing the Dark Matter: Connecting Tacit and System Knowledge in Human-AI Collaborations
2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), NIER Track, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
https://cabird.com/pdfs/dearstyne2026revealing.pdf
2
Real-World Traceability Patterns for Generative AI Systems: With Insights from the Safa Dataset
2026 RAISE Workshop on Requirements Engineering for AI-powered SoftwarE at ICSE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
3
QuestRL: A Q&A Framework for Designing Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning Systems
2025 IEEE 33rd International Requirements Engineering Conference, Valencia, Spain
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11190358
4
Assessing Compliance of Software System Designs to Laws, Regulations, and their Underlying Values
2025 IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Designing Software (Designing) at ICSE, Ottawa, ON, Canada
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11029552
5
Supporting Software Maintenance with Dynamically Generated Document Hierarchies
2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Flagstaff, AZ
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10795041
6
ROOT: Requirements Organization and Optimization Tool
2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Flagstaff, AZ
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10795032
7
Prompts Matter: Insights and Strategies for Prompt Engineering in Automated Software Traceability
2023 IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops, Hanover, Germany
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10260721
8
SAFA: A Tool for Supporting Safety Analysis in Evolving Software Systems
2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Rochester, MI
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3559535
9
MEWS: Real-time Social Media Manipulation Detection and Analysis
2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Competition and Demonstration Track, Virtual
https://proceedings.mlr.press/v176/ford22a/ford22a.pdf