I am originally from Jadcherla, which was a rural town when I was growing up. I lived there until I was twelve, when my father moved our family to Hyderabad so that my brother and I could have access to better education. At the time, I did not have a choice in that move, but in hindsight it shaped much of who I became. As a small reflection of where I started, none of the schools I studied at in Jadcherla exist anymore; they eventually closed due to lack of admissions. It was not an ideal place to begin, but it gave me perspective early on.

After finishing high school, I made a deliberate decision to leave my home state. I felt that staying close to home would keep me inside a shell, and that I needed distance and discomfort to understand the world and myself better. I chose to study Electronics and Communication Engineering at Karunya University in Coimbatore, not because of a strong pull toward the field, but because it was widely suggested and still aligned with my interests. Looking back, my undergraduate years were when I truly started to come into my own. Moving to a place where I knew no one and did not even speak the local language forced growth in ways I could not have anticipated.

During my undergraduate studies, I explored interests well outside my major. I took electives in astrophysics and chemistry in everyday life, led the Leadership and Management Club, and gave more than twenty seminars across four years. I also graduated with distinction, cleared the GATE examination in 2017 as the only qualifier from my university that year, and received multiple job offers through campus placements. These experiences helped me gain confidence not just in technical ability, but in communication, leadership, and explaining ideas to others.

I have always been deeply curious. As a child, I repeatedly read science, world, and space encyclopedias, and that habit never really went away. Programming, however, initially intimidated me. Early exposure involved handwritten code without execution, which made it abstract and discouraging. That changed when I encountered assembly language, where computation felt like solving concrete puzzles about data movement and operations. That moment quietly reshaped how I think about learning and teaching: when something feels inaccessible, it is often a problem of explanation rather than ability.

I completed my master’s degree and doing my current PhD at UC Irvine in Computer Engineering, focusing on computer architecture and embedded systems, which had always been the subjects I enjoyed most. During graduate school, I realized how limited my undergraduate exposure to modern architecture had been, having learned older processors while others were already studying x86 and cache hierarchies. That realization replaced overconfidence with humility and reinforced my desire to keep learning deeply.

I spent time in industry as a software development engineer at Amazon, not as a long-term destination, but because I believe that teaching responsibly requires understanding where students are likely to go. If most students enter industry, then a teacher should understand industry firsthand. That experience shaped how I think about systems, constraints, and real-world expectations, and it continues to inform how I approach teaching.

Pursuing a PhD was always the natural next step for me. During my master’s program, I received doctoral offers from two computer architecture professors at UC Irvine, including Professor Jean-Luc Gaudiot. I later chose to work on hardware security, even though security was an area I found intimidating. I saw it as a final challenge to confront directly, combining architectural depth with a domain I wanted to master. My research today reflects an iterative mindset: questioning assumptions, breaking ideas apart, improving them, and repeating the process.

Teaching, however, has always been the center of gravity in my life. In Indian culture, the teacher is placed very highly and I grew up with deep respect for that idea. I have been fortunate to have at least one good teacher at every stage of my life, someone who guided me when I needed it most. Now, I see it as my responsibility to do the same for the next generation. I have taught formally as a teaching assistant and informally by returning to my old tutoring center during holidays to teach middle and high school students for free. One evening, while teaching biology as an engineering student, I lost track of time, and the students refused to leave even when their parents arrived late. Moments like that made it clear to me that this is what I am meant to do.

Outside academia, I am curious in many directions. I have played a wide range of sports recreationally, trained in dance and yoga to near-instructor level, and spent a year after my undergraduate studies traveling solo across India. I am a voracious reader of fiction, a long-time anime fan, and an avid consumer of manga and light novels, having read hundreds over the years. That curiosity eventually pushed me to start learning Japanese seriously, reading, writing, and speaking it alongside my technical work.

At my core, I see myself as a teacher. Everything else I do—research, industry experience, travel, discipline, and exploration—is in service of that identity. If someone finishes reading this page and feels that I am someone they could talk to, learn from, or think alongside, then this page has done its job.

If you’d like to talk, learn together, or just ask a question, you can reach me at jayakeshav.work@gmail.com.