Kavishka Bartlett

Class of 2026
Majors in Electrical Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics

Coming from Los Angeles, California as the first student from my school to attend Duke, I had almost no connections. Learning how to navigate the academic and social environment was a challenge, but it forced me to truly learn everything. I ended up joining Club Tennis, Duke Rowing, Duke Aero, Duke Combat Robotics, Duke SEDS, and becoming an Orientation Leader for Project Play. Beginning my junior year, I started researching with the Duke Aeroelasticity group, using CUDA, Kokkos, and MPI programming to parallelize computation fluid dynamic calculations. This year, I am working on combining Physics Induced Neural Networks and Surrogate Machine Learning Models to replace 72 hour CFD calculations with relatively instant predictions. Outside of academics, I throughly enjoy traveling - I have hiked all 50 states and traveled to Sydney, Australia for my junior fall. I enjoy competing in music, mainly piano, bass, and guitar, watching my Fantasy team lose to autodrafters, and going to Duke Football games.

Favorite Class: ECE 250 - While assembly code can be a bit tedious, this is the first class where you truly see the connection between software and hardware. You end up building a fully functioning 16-bit CPU in Logisim using basic logic gates, and can execute MIPS Programs you write on the CPU you built. You also build and test the simple logic gates you used to make your CPU, so in theory, you could physically build your CPU and run programs on it. As an ECE/CS major, it was satisfying to see how the Computer Engineering and Software Engineering fundamentally work together.