Oscar Jaroker

I am a senior at Colgate University studying Applied Mathematics and Physics, with an interest in mathematical modeling, data analysis, and the computational methods behind simulation and optimization. I am also the founder and President of the Colgate Engineering and Design Club, where students design and build long-term engineering projects.

This fall I am writing my senior theses in both majors. In applied mathematics, I am working on what a finite time-delay-embedded Koopman model can recover from a partially observed delay system whose delay depends on its own state. I am also a Teaching Assistant for PHYS 125, the introductory physics course.

During the summer of 2026, I was a High Performance Computing intern at the National Security Agency. I worked on a small team that wrote a multithreaded file transfer tool in C to replace the agency’s incumbent utility. It outperformed every alternative we benchmarked, and the congestion control algorithm we designed for it keyed on delivery rate rather than packet loss, which eliminated a throughput-collapse failure mode on high-bandwidth-delay paths. The tool will be made open-source soon.

Through the 2025-26 academic year, I was an undergraduate research assistant in Colgate’s Geography Laboratory, building Arduino-based sensing devices for AQUA-Flux, a low-cost autonomous floating chamber for monitoring methane and carbon dioxide in wetlands. My work included soldering circuit boards, troubleshooting I²C communication between sensors, and programming the microcontroller for actuator movement and data collection. That spring I was also the Course Teaching Assistant for PHYS 334 Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity and the Laboratory Teaching Assistant for PHYS 336 Digital and Analog Electronics.

Earlier, I spent the summer of 2025 teaching a Science Olympiad training course at Art of Problem Solving and building personal projects, including a spring system simulator with eigenmode analysis and a stochastic predator-prey optimal control model. In the summer of 2024, I was a Corporate Treasury intern at Pfizer, where I used Python and the Bloomberg API to benchmark the drug industry and to independently reproduce the S&P credit rating of Pfizer’s corporate debt.

My hobbies include playing tennis, paddle, table tennis (as well as a few more racket sports) and working on small personal projects, usually inspired by current classwork. This website is still in development.