Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Tristan!

AI-for-science PhD student at ETH Zurich (Carrasquilla group) and founding member of Kayba (Berkeley SkyDeck Batch 22).

Previously Simons Foundation, Oxford, EPFL, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, LMU Munich.

Interested in

frontier AI and science
- training AI models to simulate quantum physics
- autoresearch with agents
- training LLM for physics
building AI colleagues
startups

Worked on

self-improving agents at Kayba AI (3k+ stars on github)
- Agentic Context Engine: agents that learn from experience (2.6k stars)
- autoharness: improve an agent harness autonomously overnight (308 stars)
applying AI to quantum many-body problems
- QMBL: a live record of the best published ground-state energies for lattice Hamiltonians
- autoresearch for physics: agents optimizing algorithm for variational Monte Carlo
- tasks for Terminal-Bench Science (DMRG, NQS, QMC)
proactive AI coworkers
AI agents for insurance underwriting (Silverarrow)
opensource code contributions to agentic-context-engine, autoharness, NetKet, orcahand

Writing

Articles:

2026-05-16 — The AI race has two fronts
2026-05-14 — From models to harnesses: how the AI community unlocked huge upside at marginal extra costs
2026-04-26 — Opensource self-improving agents: How our agent performance increased autonomously by 40%

Academic writing:

master thesis (ETH Zurich, LMU Munich): Towards a Novel Paradigm of Physical Wavefunction Approximators, 2025 (paper pending)
research report (Oxford): Mode Sorting with Diffractive Neural Networks, 2023
bachelor thesis (Max Planck Institute): Measuring Beam Deflections via Weak Amplification in a Sagnac Interferometer, 2022

Fellowships: Hans-Rudolf-Stiftung graduate fellowship, ETH ITP graduate mobility stipend, LMU Prosa stipend, Swiss-European Mobility Programme grant (SERI), Erasmus+ research mobility stipend, Downside School excellence scholarship

Outside work: art, piano, philosophy, chess (founded the LMU chess club, founding member of the TUM chess club)

Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Tristan!

Interested in

Worked on

Writing

Links