Dylan Ashraf

Chemistry + Computer Science

Rising senior American High School Fremont, California

01

About

I'm a rising senior at American High School in Fremont, California, headed toward a double major in Chemistry and Computer Science with a minor in Applied Mathematics.

A little about me: I've been writing code since the seventh grade! It started with making games, which is still where a lot of my creative energy goes. As I went through high school, my interest in the physical sciences grew and shaped a lot of the projects I work on today. These days I spend most of my time in the space where chemistry, biology, and computing overlap: cheminformatics, small independent research projects, and the occasional hackathon.

Portrait of Dylan Ashraf
02

Now

Updated August 2026

03

Blog

Updates on research, projects, and school.

All posts →

04

Research

  1. Published

    Restoring Grokking Under Structured Label Noise: Audit Efficiency and Optimization-History Dependence

    Journal of High School Science (JHSS) · Volume 10, Issue 2 · 2026

    Awarded the Certificate of Excellence in Scholarship for the best original manuscript of the issue.

  2. In review

    Carried but Conditionally Used: A Frozen Held-Out Audit of Whether Chirality-Aware Molecular Fingerprints Predict Measured Same-Assay Enantioselectivity

    Journal of Cheminformatics · 2026

    My entry for the Regeneron Science Talent Search. Code, data, and the analysis protocol — frozen and hashed before any held-out modeling — are publicly archived on Zenodo.

  3. In review

    A Completeness-Corrected Rotation Census of the Jupiter Trojan Swarms: The Apparent L4/L5 Asymmetry is a Survey-Coverage Artifact

    Journal of High School Science (JHSS) · 2026

  4. In review

    How Much Does Handedness Matter? Stereochemical Discrimination by Protein Target Family, Measured from Same-Assay Enantiomer Pairs in ChEMBL

    Journal of High School Science (JHSS) · 2026

  5. In review

    Are Catalytic Metal Sites More Distorted? An Archive-Wide, Confound-Matched Test of the Entatic-State Hypothesis in Zinc and Iron

    Journal of High School Science (JHSS) · 2026

  6. In progress

    Do Lens Detectors Need Look-Alike Negatives? A Controlled, Preregistered Test of Hard-Negative Training in Strong Gravitational-Lens Searches

    Independent research · manuscript in preparation · 2026

  7. In progress

    Schistosomiasis egg detection in urine-filtration microscopy

    Manuscript in preparation · not yet released · 2026

Independent research, mostly computational. More papers are in preparation; the code for every project that is public lives on GitHub.

05

Projects

Noise Geometry Determines Audit Efficiency

GitHub ↗

The code and experiments behind my published JHSS paper: a study of grokking and generalization that asks how the geometry of structured label noise decides how efficiently a limited audit budget can relabel data and recover clean performance.

  • Interpretability
  • Label noise
  • PyTorch

Gravitational-Lens Detector Study

Read about it ↗

A controlled experiment on what actually fixes false positives in machine-learning detectors of strong gravitational lenses — and a preregistered follow-up that was stopped by its own kill-switch when it missed the bar it had set for itself.

  • Machine learning
  • Astronomy
  • Preregistration

OEIS Network Science

GitHub ↗

A network-science look at the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, modeling sequences and their cross-references as a graph to surface hidden structure across mathematics.

  • Network science
  • Graphs
  • Python

PillPal — Congressional App Challenge

GitHub (v1) ↗

A mobile app that helps seniors keep track of and remember their medications, built from scratch for the 2025 Congressional App Challenge. It is now getting a complete revamp — rebuilt and expanded end to end — as my entry for the 2026 Challenge.

  • Flutter · Dart
  • Health
  • Mobile

Cheminformatics Capstone

Read the report ↗ GitHub ↗

A reproducible computational medicinal-chemistry comparison of eight antischistosomal compounds, recomputing every descriptor with RDKit, cross-checking against PubChem, and applying only published drug-likeness rules (Lipinski, Veber, QED, PAINS/Brenk) — no invented scoring.

  • Cheminformatics
  • RDKit
  • Python

Traveling Salesman Problem

GitHub ↗

A run at the classic Traveling Salesman Problem, mentored by Aniket Sadashiva during my UC Berkeley internship, where I picked up a lot of dynamic programming.

  • Algorithms
  • Dynamic programming

Disease Evaluation (MediaPipe)

Scrapped · may return within PillPal

A MediaPipe app that reads external symptoms to flag possible disease early. Scrapped until further notice — parts of it may resurface inside the PillPal rebuild.

  • Computer vision
  • MediaPipe
  • Health

Student Planner

Shelved · replaced by the PillPal rebuild

An app to help overloaded students stay on top of school and their workload. No longer happening — the PillPal rebuild took its place.

  • App
  • Productivity
  • Dart

A couple dozen more — games, ML experiments, and early web builds — live on GitHub. See all on GitHub ↗

06

Experience

UC Berkeley — Prof. Salahuddin

Research Intern · 2 years
  • Explored the Traveling Salesman Problem under mentor Aniket Sadashiva, picking up dynamic programming along the way.

Game Development Club — American High School

President · 2 years
  • Taught students to use Unity and other engines from scratch, with no prior coding experience needed.
  • Built a portfolio of 12+ games for the American High community.

Hackathons

Competitor · Ongoing
  • Triple Gold Brick at UC Berkeley CALICO Spring 2026 with YoungWonks Team E — top 7% in every category, competing alongside university teams as high schoolers.
  • Finalist placements at other hackathons.
07

Games

My portfolio! 12+ games built with and for the American High community through the Game Development Club, plus game jam entries.

See the collection on itch.io ↗

08

Academics

AP Chemistry 5
AP Physics 1 5
AP Calculus BC 5
AP Computer Science A 5
AP Microeconomics 5
AP World History 4

Sitting / awaiting scores: Physics C: Mechanics, Physics C: Electricity & Magnetism, Macroeconomics, U.S. Government, Computer Science Principles, Biology, Statistics, Environmental Science (2027).

SAT
1530 · first try
Taking now
Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra, taken concurrently
Up next
Differential Equations and Discrete / Proof-Based Mathematics (spring)
Completed
Programming with Data Structures & Algorithms — Ohlone College
College credit
Ohlone College · Laney College · City College of San Francisco · Foothill College
Honors
  • Certificate of Excellence in Scholarship — Journal of High School Science Awarded by the JHSS editorial board for the best original manuscript of Volume 10, Issue 2 (2026).
  • Triple Gold Brick Award — UC Berkeley CALICO, Spring 2026 Gold Brick in all three categories with YoungWonks Team E: #24 of 375 globally (top 6.4%), #19 of 259 pre-college (top 7.34%), and #13 of 164 in the United States (top 7.93%), against a field that included university teams.
  • AP Scholar with Distinction
  • State Seal of Biliteracy