Kate Barouch

Co-designed the company’s end-to-end protein engineering pipeline alongside the founder, and later partnered with advisors to iterate on the approach. Established benchmarks for sequence filtering and scoring, enabling scalable evaluation of 10,000+ candidate sequences per batch. Collaborated with leadership to define R&D priorities and develop investor pitch decks.

Built a hierarchical CNN pipeline to classify 8 UTI-causing bacterial species from colorimetric paper test strip images, achieving >90% accuracy at 12 hours and 99.1% peak accuracy after 19 hours. Preprocessed and curated a dataset of 20–35 batches/species and optimized image feature extraction. Presented findings to academic and industry stakeholders at UC Berkeley and BugSense, outlining next steps to enhance early species detection.

Co-organized three flagship networking events, increasing attendance from 15 to over 50 students and securing speakers from companies like Upside Foods, Myriad Genetics, and Bakar Bio Labs. Established cross-program partnerships with the Sustainability Biotech Group, expanding reach and industry engagement.

Lead a small team of peers at OptiGenix while participating in Berkeley SkyDeck’s ACE Program Subject to nda, no further details available

Perform basic wet chemistry and enzymatic analysis for juice must and wine. Operate laboratory instruments including refractometer, DMA, Y15 Automatic Analyzer, alcolyzer, and pH electrode. Collect wine samples from tanks and barrels and track their progression through fermentation. Assist with barrel/cellar work as needed to support production (scissor lift certified).

Survey assigned vineyard blocks in 20+ organic vineyards. Record observations including water stress, shatter, verasion, and diseases and pests. Collect yield estimate data, petiole samples, and pressure bomb readings.

Concentrating in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

B.S. in Biological Sciences