Khai Pham
Hometown: Sugar Land, Texas
Website:
Biography
Khai Wilson Pham is a rising sophomore studying Computer Science at Rice University. His drive to use computation for real-world problems grew out of community work at The Beacon, a Houston service center for the unhoused, where he has spent the past three years recycling discarded animal fat from local butchers into over 7,000 bars of soap. He has built a machine learning music recommender trained on 170,000 Spotify tracks and led front-end development on a financial accessibility tool. Khai is interested in interpretable and trustworthy machine learning, specifically how models can support better decision-making in settings where data is incomplete. As an active member of the NSBE and a former coding instructor who mentored over 40 K-12 students, he is committed to making technical knowledge more accessible. Khai is a TEA Student Heroes Award recipient and plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science focused on human-centered AI. In his free time, he enjoys playing Blood on the Clocktower with friends, calisthenics, and zipping around campus on his electric scooter.
