👩🏻 I’m Zelan Eroz Espanto — but most people call me Z.E.E or just Z. Fun fact: "Zelan Eroz" is an anagram of my parents’ names.
💻 Interested in AI alignment, agents, and full-stack development. I’m currently learning how to build full-stack cloud applications that are scalable, useful, and actually pleasant for people to use. I’m drawn to projects that sit between research and software engineering, where the work starts with a human question: “What do people actually need?”
🎓 I’m a Computer Science major at Case Western Reserve University, minoring in Maths and possibly Philosophy.
- My education is made possible as a Point Wells Fargo Scholar and UWC Davis Scholar.
- I was born and raised in the Philippines then moved to Japan for the IB Diploma Program at UWC ISAK Japan (2022-2024), came to the United States for university, and studied abroad in Singapore (Spring 2026).
📍 I've been to 🇵🇭🇯🇵🇹🇭🇺🇸🇲🇽🇮🇸🇸🇬🇲🇾🇮🇩🇰🇷🇹🇼 and I hope to visit 10 more before I graduate!
- 👩🏻💻 Building AI agents with CWRU’s Institute for Smart, Secure and Connected Systems (ISSACS) to support ORTM in streamlining high-stakes, high-funding NIH research grant budget proposals and reducing administrative bottlenecks.
- 🔎 Researching Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to improve LLM reasoning.
- 🤝 Open to Fall 2026 & Summer 2027 internship/co-op in research, industry, or startup environments (AI/ML Engineering, SWE).
| Category | Stack |
|---|---|
| Languages |       |
| Frameworks & UI |    |
| Cloud Infra & DevOps |    |
| AI/ML |     |
| Database |   |
| Tools & Design |      |
My24 is a SwiftUI iOS app built to help users reflect on and organize their daily life through a clean, simple, and personal interface. I built this project for myself because I wanted to become more intentional about how I spend my day-to-day life. It helps me track how my energy and mood shift throughout the day, plan my time around those patterns, and set weekly goals across different areas of life like coding, LeetCode, exercise, and social connection. The project focuses on building a polished mobile experience using Swift, Xcode, custom views, reusable components, and organized app architecture. This is my first iOS project!
Tech Stack: Swift, SwiftUI, Xcode
Highlights:
- Built with a native SwiftUI interface
- Designed with a clean and minimal user experience
- Includes custom app styling, assets, and reusable UI structure
| Company / Organization | Role | Duration | Stack | Key Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MIT AI Alignment | AI Safety & Ethics Fellow | Summer 2026 | AI safety, alignment, interpretability | Selected for a competitive fellowship focused on alignment, interpretability, threat models, and responsible AI governance. |
| ISSACS | Software Engineering Intern | Summer 2026 | Gemini, Google AI Studio, Pytest, CI/CD | Building an AI budget assistant for NIH grant workflows, combining stakeholder discovery, prompt design, and automated testing to reduce manual review bottlenecks. |
| Algoverse | Researcher | Summer 2026 | Python, Listwise DPO | Designing a trace-ranking pipeline that uses correctness, bidirectional entailment, and clustering to construct preference lists for fine-tuning math reasoning models with PRO/LiPO-style objectives. |
| Algoverse | Researcher | Spring 2026 | Python, LLM APIs, Lambda Labs | Built multimodal evaluation pipelines to study sycophantic drift in LLM reasoning chains under controlled user pressure. |
| Biswas Lab | Research Assistant | Fall 2026 | Python, PyTorch, RAG, LLMs | Developed reproducible NLP pipelines to evaluate bias and fairness in LLM-based sensitive classification tasks. |
| KPMG | AI Fellow | Fall 2026 | NLP, NLTK, scikit-learn, PyTorch | Built task-classification and model-routing pipelines to reduce GenAI energy use and cost while preserving performance. |
| West Side Market | Consultant | Fall 2026 | Qualtrics, Python, pandas, NumPy, K-means | Analyzed survey and geographic data to segment customers, map demand patterns, and translate raw feedback into strategic insights for the West Side Market’s $70M renovation. |
- 🌐 Website