hi! I'm Lain

I am a first year CS PhD student at UT Austin.

I'm interested in multi-agent reinforcement learning, particularly ad hoc teamwork and human-robot teams, as well as RL for robot manipulation and control.

During undergrad, I worked at the intersection of cybersecurity and machine learning. I completed my MS thesis at UT Austin on Evolutionary Policy Optimization under the supervision of Dr. Keshav Pingali and Dr. Risto Miikkulainen at UT Austin. In Fall 2025, I helped launch and teach a new graduate course on ML for Systems Researchers. I led the ML/RL reading group at CDGC from Summer 2024 to Spring 2026.

I’ve wanted to build companies for as long as I can remember. My first incubator was at 15, and in 2022 I founded Medexe, a medical AI startup. Since then, I’ve been looking for the problem I truly want to obsess over.

I am from Ankara, Turkey. You might also know me as Zelal.

interests

• music (trip hop, metal, rock)
• motorsports, formula 1, cars (i daily drive a camaro)
• games (bioshock, ultimate ninja storm, arkham trilogy, etc.)
• aviation
• objectivism