Russell Tran Email & Phone Number

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

Los Angeles, California, United States

APPA, the American Pandemic Prevention Association, is an emerging biosecurity nonprofit that represents and serves the American people’s interest in preventing future pandemics. We aim to raise the collective engagement, education, and agency of a republic that’s both vulnerable to pandemic threats and subject to an incomplete pandemic prevention system. We collaborate with and are guided by top experts and institutions in public health and medicine, and we consider ourselves a lean, forceful shop for funding and testing under-resourced ideas with high potential to advance pandemic prevention in America. We are executing a national scientific & political advocacy campaign to contain the 2024 H5N1 avian influenza outbreak in animals, livestock, and humans in the U.S. in order to mitigate the risk of a pandemic-capable virus that may occur through mutations or viral reassortment with human seasonal flu. The campaign is urgently ramping up in response to the increased viral reassortment risk posed by the annual U.S. seasonal flu spike expected in December of this year.America's pandemic prevention system is disjointed and tough to orchestrate — not for lack of scientific talent or intent, which are plentiful and earnest — but because it requires coordinating an extraordinarily complex web of interconnected systems: public health infrastructure, academic research, agricultural practices, climate adaptation, disease surveillance, cultural behaviors, and more. We specialize in researching and mapping these connections, whether obvious or hidden, and highlighting vulnerabilities before they become crises. To strengthen and build new pandemic defenses, we're building bridges between scientists, policymakers, agricultural leaders, and government officials at both federal and state levels. We seek advisors in policy and agriculture who can help forge these critical connections and translate systemic insights into actionable reforms.

Providing the public's support for an expansion in the scope of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine to include pandemic prevention biomedical technology research in its grantmaking, advised by Stanford Professor Steve Luby MD

Implemented demonstration of ML models' vulnerability to Python Pickle injection

Freight (shipping) industry software

Federated Machine Learning for Smart Compose keyboard autocomplete on Oculus virtual reality headset

Brophy Lab - Arabidopsis plant synthetic biology

Apprentice under Keoni Gandall - E. coli and Vibrio natriegens synthetic biology

Harnessing Plants Initiative (Chory and Busch Labs) - enhanced carbon sequestration of agricultural crops synthetic biology

The Boring Company is a tunnel construction startup spun off from SpaceX. I joined the software team as the company's first SWE intern and served as the de facto technical lead/project manager for the development of a bespoke 40-device RFID antenna network for tracking Tesla vehicles in the company's first 2-mile subway project, in Las Vegas. I wrote the TCP-based backend service in Go and installed and end-to-end tested the hardware system to v1 deployment, managing our collaboration with the hardware-firmware supplier along the way. My backend service and RFID data encoding protocol are still used in production today, serving a cumulative ridership of 1.5 million passengers as of July 2024. Other projects include creating a corresponding RFID Bluetooth iPad app for technicians, and leading a construction team of 5 to manually update the firmware for 60 in-house LED PCB drivers in the tunnel for rainbow color lighting. Our software team met tight deadlines to produce impressive demos for VIPs belonging to the company’s external stakeholders.Languages used: Go, Python, Swift, Javascript

Operations and sales

Studied tunnel segment manufacturing procedures at the concrete plant, then filmed and produced the company’s corresponding training videos

Kuhn-Hicks Cancer Lab

Distributor for Opentrons, a biology pipetting robotics company

Started a grassroots student coalition to introduce and pass an $18.3 million, 6.8 MW public school solar energy project spanning 7 sites. The project won unanimous school district board approval in 2017, and construction completed 2018-2020. Projected to net $21.1 million in energy savings, offset 90,000 tons of CO2 over 25 years.

M.S. Computer Science, Network And Computer Security Emphasis

B.S. Computer Science, Systems Emphasis

Bachelor Of Science

Activities and Societies: Spark SC USC Trustee Scholar (4-year, full tuition merit scholarship) RHP Scholar (early admission.