Jessie Dong

I'm interested in the physical limits of hardware, and how software can work within them. Concretely, at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL), I work on modeling how vehicles and other physical systems move. At Tesla, I worked on battery hardware and simulation-in-the-loop software. At Foundry (now Mithril), I saw how software, even open-source software, shapes how large inference optimizations get deployed on GPUs.

Separately from my technical interests, I'm drawn to the humanities. I have done a meaningful amount of work here. I was part of Structured Liberal Education, reading and thinking about texts spanning nearly three thousand years (from Homer and Zhuangzi to Dante and Assia Djebar). With Stanford Libraries, I created an archival project. At the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, I founded and led initiatives to help humanities researchers bring computational text analysis into their work on large collections of texts. At the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, I worked with Firefox's education arm (Mozilla Foundation) on how higher education should adapt to AI (or more accurately, how AI should adapt to learning).

I think I'm entrepreneurial at heart. More recently, I founded a consumer AI product early in 2025, which I sold to Strut IT. When I was younger, I created a probiotic yogurt line to support gut health and sold it at farmers markets, namely GrowNYC and Harvest Home. In parallel during this time, my interest in health and society led me to In 2019-2023, I led public health initiatives and advocacy, covering both science and policy. Led a 13-person team studying over-the-counter supplements, and published the project through the Boston Congress of Public Health. Founded a not-for-profit, "Push for Public Health", an official partner of incubators at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Society for Public Health Education. I spoke before legislators on bills and produced much of the media content for these incubators. On the advocacy side, I founded a nonpartisan civic media organization, supported by former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, where I produced dozens of videos explaining government to young and first-time voters, with a focus on health policy and civic engagement (some include senator Elizabeth Warren, all the candidates for the 2021 NYC mayoral race, district attorney, and smaller city council races). In parallel, I approached the pandemic's pressing health question on vaccinations in a behavioral psychology lens through a group initiative to study the psychology of vaccine hesitancy in relation to physicians; we published the project in a psychology journal. At SUNY Old Westbury, I did wet lab research with cancer cell cultures and organoids, testing natural supplement ingredients (luteolin) on neuroblastoma and lymphoma. My research was showcased at many science fairs across the tri-state area and larger ones, including the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium and the International Science and Engineering Fair. health policy organizations and related research projects.