Bonnie Akhavan

Bonnie Akhavan

Graduate Student

MIT Operations Research

About Me

Hi! I’m Bonnie, an incoming master’s student at MIT studying operations research engineering. My advisor is Professor Retsef Levi. I’m graduating from Cornell University in May 2022 with a degree in both computer science and operations research, and I’m very interested in the intersection of mathematics, computing, and social good. I currently work with professors Peter Frazier, Shane Henderson, and David Shmoys on the Cornell COVID-19 Modeling Team, where we analyze campus data to help guide administrative decisions.

I’ve previously interned for various organizations, including University of Maryland Aerospace Engineering, Vonage, Bandwidth, and Goldman Sachs. I’ll be returning to Goldman Sachs this upcoming summer as a Quantitative Strategy Summer Analyst.

Download my resumé.

Reach out to me at bca44 [at] cornell.edu.

Interests
  • Stochastic Processes
  • Statistics
  • Healthcare Systems
  • Networks
Education
  • M.S. in Operations Research, 2024

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • B.S. in Computer Science and Operations Research Engineering, 2022

    Cornell University

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Summer Quant Intern (Commodities)
Goldman Sachs
Jun 2022 – Present New York, NY
Continuing development on a quoting system from my previous internship
 
 
 
 
 
Summer Quant Intern (SPG, Commodities)
Goldman Sachs
Jun 2021 – Aug 2021 New York, NY
Created new tradeables for an averaging equity swap and worked on developing architecture for a new autoquoting system for oil derivatives.
 
 
 
 
 
Software Development Intern (Voice)
Bandwidth
May 2020 – Aug 2020 Raleigh, NC
Designed a low-latency database system for international least-cost telephone routing.
 
 
 
 
 
Engineering/ML Intern
Vonage
May 2019 – Jul 2019 Holmdel, NJ
Led efforts in cleaning data and training NLP classification models from customer service requests.

Projects

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PokerBot
PokerBot is a collaborative project containing multiple reinforcement learning agents that learn to play poker against a human opponent.
Tickets, Please: Alert Level Red
This project is a redesign of the popular indie game “Papers, Please” with a Cornell theme. In this game, the player lives the life of a Cornell ticket collector who must make enough money to pay his rent each day.
WordRL
WordRL is a reinforcement learning project that learns how to play the online sensation “Wordle”, as well as other variant “X-dle” games.