Student · Engineer · Builder
High-school student in Kuwait. Right now I'm building Saya — a low-cost wearable that warns outdoor workers before heat becomes deadly. I also lead a CS club, design game worlds, box, and ship real software.
My deepest project — a year of research, hardware, and a real field study in Kuwait's 46°C summer.
Outdoor workers in the Gulf face heat that kills — often before they realize they're in danger. Saya is a low-cost wrist wearable that continuously monitors the body and the environment and issues early, staged warnings of heat strain. It pairs with a field study asking whether danger actually strikes outside the legally protected hours.
Explore the full project →The project site has the full build log, an interactive 3D model of the watch, and a live heat-risk tool for Kuwait.
A device only matters if it changes something. Here is the change I'm arguing for — and the evidence I'm gathering to support it.
Heat protection should be triggered by conditions and physiology — not by the calendar and the clock.
Kuwait's midday work ban runs 11:00–16:00, from 1 June to 31 August. It is a real protection and it saves lives. But it protects by time, and the human body doesn't work on a schedule. My study is testing whether dangerous heat strain is happening in the hours the law leaves open — and if it is, the rule should follow the conditions, the way ISO 7243 and most modern occupational standards already do.
This is the change I'd push for first, and it costs almost nothing. In occupational heat-death investigations, a large share of fatalities occur in a worker's first days on the job — before the body has adapted. Yet workers arrive in Kuwait from cooler climates and go straight into 46 °C with no ramp-up. A graduated 7–14 day exposure protocol requires no equipment and would likely save more lives than any device, including mine.
For heat stroke, cold-water immersion is the treatment standard, and it works only if applied within minutes. A tub, water and ice at every large site is inexpensive — but almost no Gulf site has one. I'd argue for designated cooling stations with shade, cold drinking water, and immersion capability, at an enforced maximum distance from the work area, because "provide shade" without a number gets ignored.
A warning is worthless if a worker isn't allowed to act on it. Symptom-recognition training should be mandatory for supervisors, alongside an explicit right for a worker to stop without penalty. This is why Saya logs whether an alert was acknowledged and whether rest actually followed — protection has to be verifiable, not just advisory.
A finding only matters if it reaches the people who write policy. I'm working to present this research directly to officials responsible for labour and worker safety in Kuwait — because the argument for condition-based protection has to be made to them, with data, not just published.
add who you met, when, and what you presented
I haven't finished collecting data yet, so these are the changes I'm working toward — not conclusions I've earned. If my trials show strain stays inside the banned hours, that's a finding too, and the recommendation changes. The point of doing the study is that the evidence decides, not me.
Two studies behind Saya — and the academics I'm lucky to work with. I collaborate with university professors across three countries.
The original proof-of-concept study behind Saya, conducted for AP Research — accepted for publication in the National High School Journal of Science. add one-line finding
The full study: 25–30 outdoor workers in Kuwait, testing whether heat strain strikes outside the legal work-ban hours. Ethics-approved; drafting toward submission. add target venue
I work with Dr. Fatima Boujarwah (Kuwait University) and Dr. Miles Stopher (Cambridge) on the study and the paper, and I'm in conversation with Dr. Barrak Alahmad (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), whose research on heat and outdoor migrant workers in Kuwait shaped how I framed my question. adjust as the collaboration develops
I started on Scratch at nine, dragging blocks together to make things move. Nothing sophisticated — but it's where I learned that if you can describe what you want precisely enough, you can make a machine do it. Everything since has been the same instinct with better tools. See my Scratch projects →
C++ on Arduino is what Saya runs on — I wrote the firmware that reads the sensors over I²C, learns each worker's baseline, and drives the staged alerts. Python for data work: processing logged sensor output and analysing trial results.
This site, my Computer Science Club's site, and the live Kuwait heat-risk tool — which pulls real weather data and computes the heat index in the browser using the same equation as Saya's firmware. I also helped build the RoadHero app in React Native for a family-owned business.
I built Saya's first prototypes on breadboard — wiring PPG, temperature, humidity and motion sensors onto a shared I²C bus, resolving address conflicts, and driving motors and a piezo buzzer through transistor circuits. I did the initial schematic capture and component selection in Flux.ai and KiCad, then worked with an electronics engineer to take it to a manufacturable four-layer board. I read and correct the full manufacturing file set myself — schematics, PCB layout, Gerbers, BOMs and pick-and-place files.
Other things I've built with my hands: my own PC from parts for KD 500, and my own RC car.
The skill I didn't expect to need most: choosing parts from datasheets, writing a bill of materials with real part numbers, catching errors in a quotation, and briefing PCB fabricators and an industrial designer clearly enough that they could build what I meant. Knowing what to ask for is its own discipline.
Designed and built a working robot last summer — the project where I first took an idea from loose parts to a finished, moving thing. what did it do?
Where I lead, build, and compete.
Founded and lead my school's CS club — and built its website too. I run coding competitions for members and secured school sponsorship for a KD 40 prize to make them worth entering, ran a cybersecurity awareness campaign, and led a team from the club to the iDRAK STEM challenge, where we placed first. AUS Instagram ↗
My project "Green Horizons" placed 1st in the bp Kuwait × iDRAK STEM innovation program — beating 22 schools on a sustainability/energy challenge. Covered by Kuwait Times. iDRAK ↗
Traveled internationally twice — conferences in Qatar and Turkey — and brought home two Best Delegate awards plus an Honorable Mention. name the specific awards (e.g. Best Delegate / Honorable Mention)
Played Rolf in our school production of The Sound of Music — stepping on stage stretches a different kind of nerve than a circuit board. add year / other roles
Coverage of my work — third-party validation I'm proud of.
Coverage of the STEM innovation program where my project "Green Horizons" placed 1st.
add Saya press, talks, or features as they come
Real-world engineering and software — I take ideas from code to finished, working things (I work in Python and HTML).
Two selective programs at top engineering schools, summer 2024.
Admitted to a competitive, selective pre-college engineering program at UC Berkeley. add focus / what you studied / a project
Selective artificial-intelligence summer program at Stanford. add focus / project
I take the hardest courses my school offers, on purpose. 16 AP exams by graduation — not for the transcript, but because the hard classes are the ones that give you tools you can actually build with.
Every AP I picked feeds something I'm doing. Physics is why I understand heat transfer and circuits. Calculus is why rate-of-change detection made sense to me before anyone explained it. Statistics is what lets me analyze my own field data instead of handing it to someone else. Chemistry and Biology are why I can read a physiology paper on thermoregulation and follow the argument.
AP Research let me spend a year on one question of my own choosing. That's where the first version of Saya came from — and the paper from it is now under review at the National High School Journal of Science. A course requirement turned into real research.
Principal's List two years running, all A's. Honor Roll in grade 10. On track to graduate as salutatorian.
AP Scholar from the College Board — 16 AP classes, passed every exam.
Most Improved awards in AP US History, AP Seminar, Spanish and PE.
American University, Washington DC — Sustainable Development and Design, summer 2024.
UC San Diego — credit for the independent research paper behind Saya.
Plus summer programs at UC Berkeley (engineering) and Stanford (AI).
Nothing I've built came from a class that was easy. The value of a hard course isn't the grade — it's that afterwards you can attempt things you couldn't attempt before.
Where I clear my head and build discipline.
Three times a week, for four years. Discipline, focus, and the only place I stop thinking about circuit boards.
Keeps me steady and clears my head. add distance / routine if you like
Games are where the building instinct goes when it isn't pointed at hardware.
I've tutored more than fifteen students in Python and HTML during lunch, over four years. Explaining something is how I find out whether I actually understand it.
I sing devotional songs and play harmonium and tabla.
I read, write and speak English, Punjabi, Spanish and Arabic — which matters more than it sounds: many of the workers in my study speak Punjabi, so I can talk to them directly.
I build worlds and run campaigns. Running a table is its own kind of systems design — you write the rules, then watch people find every gap in them. It's also where my frustration at only being able to describe things I imagined first pushed me toward building real ones. DM or player?
Hooked on solving the Rubik's cube fast — pure pattern recognition under time pressure. best time?
I've been lucky to travel a lot, and it isn't incidental to my work — Saya exists because of what I saw in the Gulf. Watching construction go up in Qatar's summer heat is where this whole project started.
Kuwait (home), Qatar, UAE, Oman, Bahrain. The region I'm researching — and where I first understood that the people building these cities are the ones least protected from their climate.
India — Delhi and Amritsar, where my family is from — plus Singapore, Malaysia, and Bali. Most of the migrant workers I'm building for come from the same country my great-grandfather left.
Where I got curious about how differently countries treat labour, climate, and public infrastructure. a specific memory from one of these?
The one place I keep going back to. I've spent nearly every summer of my life at my grandparents' home in LA — doing enrichment programs, playing sports, and slowly figuring out what daily life in America actually looks like. It's the reason the US doesn't feel like a foreign country to me, even though I've never lived there full-time.
Campus visits and summer programs at Berkeley and Stanford — and a lot of time imagining what studying in the US would actually feel like.
Istanbul, Baku, and the Maldives — three very different relationships between a country and its weather.
Drag your own photos in — the build, iDRAK, MUN trips, the boxing gym, a finished Rubik's solve. Real photos make this page yours.
I'm an American student of Indian descent, born and raised in Kuwait — a vantage point between worlds that taught me to notice things other people walk past.
I'm a practicing Sikh. I keep my hair and beard unshorn, sing kirtan, and play the harmonium in our congregation — staying true to my roots is part of who I am, not separate from it.
That rootedness is also the thread through everything I make: I fixate on a problem I can't let go of, then build my way toward an answer — a heat-safety wearable, a game world, a club, a website. rewrite this in your own voice
In school I've earned a place on the Principal's List and Honor Roll — and most of my energy goes into Saya and the research behind it, but I'm always building something.