Andy Phu

In 2022, I started my research career under Prof. Victoria Interrante, exploring VR's capabillity to elicit the positive mental health effects of nature. I had fun for a summer, but I knew I belonged elsewhere.

I transferred into mice-mind BCI & modelling, cv2x networking, sparse network autonomous driving research, and finally landed in NLP. In 2025, I joined Prof. Dongyeop Kang's Minnesota NLP group. I learned what it meant to take an idea, explore it to depths no human has gone before, and with ownership similar to running my own startup--his mentorship, and the lab's advisement (special thanks to Karin de Langis, James Mooney, and Khanh Chi Le) pushed me to conference level research in a couple months. NLP research is incredibly interesting. You're unifying milleniae of human advancement against centuries of human research. Some idea you have from human research (neuro, anthro, socio) can be transferred to llms, but the reverse direction also sometimes holds true! Any discovery in any of these fields can monumentally change the world we know (and somewhat already has!).