Maya earned her B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia Engineering in 2021, graduating as salutatorian. She is currently a research engineer in the AlQuraishi Lab, where she develops genome-scale language models for prokaryotic DNA. Her work spans data curation, infrastructure, model architecture design, training, and biological benchmarking, with a focus on modeling at single-nucleotide resolution and ultra-long context lengths. Alongside her research, she is pursuing a part-time Master’s in Statistics at Columbia, supported by the departmental MA2PhD Fellowship.

She is also generously supported by the NSF CSGrad4US Fellowship and will begin her PhD in computer science in Fall 2026. Her research interests include diffusion models for protein design, reinforcement learning for exploring conformational space, and novel architectures such as Hierarchical Dynamic Chunking from the Gu lab.