• Leading an independent research survey on genomic sequencing data compression, synthesizing classical entropy-based methods and modern neural network–based approaches to evaluate scalability and information preservation.

• Authoring a comprehensive survey comparing traditional and neural network–based compression techniques for genomic sequencing quality scores.

• Conducting research under the guidance of Professor Tsachy Weissman (Stanford University) and Professor Jouni Sirén (UC Santa Cruz).

• Analyzing trade-offs between compression ratio, reconstruction error, downstream variant-calling accuracy, and storage efficiency across methods.

https://viharitejomurtula.github.io/KnowYourSolarPublicWebsite/

• Building an independent solar insight platform which estimates rooftop solar production and cost savings using NREL data and geospatial modeling

• Designed the platform to operate independently of installers, improving homeowners trust by separating solar insights from sales incentives

• Built a location based solar estimation pipeline using publicly available data along with inputted pictures of the home

Worked as a software engineer contributing to the development of intelligent systems, with a focus on building reliable, assistive software for the elderly.

SlugSync — Software Engineer | Co-Founder

• Designed and deployed a production-grade client–server system to centralize UCSC event discovery, replacing fragmented Instagram-based discovery which is presently used.

• Built a FastAPI backend with role-based access control, enforcing ownership-level permissions so organizers can create, update, and delete only their own events.

• Implemented Google OAuth + JWT authentication, restricting access to verified UCSC accounts and enforcing authorization at the API layer.

• Implemented a relational SQL schema preserving user–event ownership, favorites, and timestamps to support filtering, search, and feed generation.

• Deployed the backend and database on Render, managing environment variables, migrations, and uptime for live mobile access.

• Working under Professor Renau at UCSC on CSRankings Arena, a system for research paper evaluation

• Utilized arXiv ingestion, OpenAI Gpt-5 API endpoints, LLM based filtering and topic classification, and YAML data ops to implement automated literature review for the topics Computer Architecture and Machine Learning