01 About
I'm on the pre-med track at Columbia, and I spend my research hours training generative models on brain scans. The two are the same ambition — I'd rather understand a disease well enough to write code that finds it than pick one side and specialise into a corner.
At the Laboratory of AI & Biomedical Science I'm working on why Alzheimer's presents so differently between patients, using diffusion models to pull apart subtypes that a single diagnosis hides. Everything below is me learning the craft that makes that possible — a tumour classifier, an eye-age model, a translator for clinical documents.
I grew up in Belgium, was born in Boulder, and moved to New York in 2025 for Columbia. English and French, natively enough to argue in both. Before any of this I co-founded a company that turned scrapped hot-air balloons into products — I'm most at home somewhere between the clinic and the terminal.
02 Selected work
Disease Heterogeneity Using Diffusion
2026 · ongoingIdentifying biologically distinct subtypes of Alzheimer's disease from multimodal neuroimaging and genetic data. Extends the Smile-GAN / Surreal-GAN / Gene-SGAN line of work with diffusion-based generative models for more stable subtype clustering.
PyTorch · Diffusion models · Multimodal neuroimaging · CUIMC
Clearchart
2026Rewrites discharge summaries, labs and radiology reports at a chosen reading level, and checks every number in the output against the source document.
React · LLM API · Prompt evaluation
Eye Age Clock
2026Predicts biological age by extracting microstructural biomarkers from retinal OCT images — the retina being the one place you can inspect neural tissue and microvasculature without cutting anything open.
PyTorch · Deep learning regression · Retinal OCT
MRI Tumor Classifier
2025Detects brain tumours from MRI at 96% accuracy. Normalisation, augmentation and regularisation throughout, to keep the thing honest on scans it has never seen.
PyTorch · ResNet-18 · AdamW · Data augmentation
Autism Classifier
2025Classifies autism spectrum disorder from responses to a standardised questionnaire. Built alongside a speech-language pathologist, so the output stays interpretable to the clinician who has to use it.
Python · scikit-learn · pandas
Online Poker Java Game
2025Five-card draw video poker: full hand evaluation, betting and credit state, built as a desktop app in Java Swing.
Java · Swing · OOP
Works in Python · PyTorch · TensorFlow · scikit-learn · NumPy · Pandas · Diffusion models · CNNs · Java · C++ · SQL · Git · Docker · GCP
03 Experience
Undergraduate Researcher
Columbia University Irving Medical Center · Laboratory of AI & Biomedical Science
Machine learning at the edge of neurodegenerative disease — finding biologically distinct subtypes of Alzheimer's in multimodal neuroimaging and genetic data. I design loss functions for clustering, disentanglement and latent priors, and take the results back to clinicians to check they mean anything.
BSc Computer Science, Pre-Med
Columbia University · New York
Rajasekharan Family Undergraduate Scholarship. Engineers Without Borders and Formula SAE on the side. Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.
Co-Founder · Head of IT & Marketing
FlyHigh Enterprise · Belgium
Turned decommissioned hot-air balloon tarps into consumer products. Roughly €11,000 in profit, a slice of it to nonprofit partners, national press coverage, and second place out of 475 in the Belgian entrepreneurship competition.
Research Internships
TU Delft / QuTech · SONACA Aerospace · Université libre de Bruxelles
Microwave-to-optical quantum transducers at Quantum Delta NL. Aircraft and space structures at SONACA. Quantum optics and computational modelling in R and MATLAB at ULB.
Founder & President, Robotics Club
École Internationale Le Verseau · Wavre
Started the school's robotics club from nothing and led it through building autonomous drones.
Head of the European People's Party
Model European Parliament · Kerkrade, Netherlands
Main submitter on position papers, and led the European Parliament's largest party through the 2024 convention. Two Best Delegation awards. Mostly it taught me to argue in front of people who disagree.
Head of DR Congo Delegation · General Assembly I
THIMUN Foundation · The Hague, Netherlands
Main submitter on 2025 convention position papers.
Head of Research, European Youth Ambassadors
École Internationale Le Verseau · Wavre
Promoted awareness of the EU's role through schoolwide initiatives. Organised a fundraiser for the Restos du Cœur, raising over €2,000.
CESS, Advanced Sciences & Mathematics
École Internationale Le Verseau · Wavre, Belgium
GPA 3.99. Alongside it: HarvardX CS50 AI, an advanced mathematics course at ULB, and a 57-page independent paper on where the limits of scientific investigation actually fall.
04 Honors & awards
- Rajasekharan Family Undergraduate ScholarshipColumbia Engineering
- Duke of Edinburgh International AwardDuke of Edinburgh
- National Entrepreneurship Competition — 2nd of 475LJE Mini-Entreprise
- Wallonia Entrepreneurship AwardWallonie Entreprendre
- Best Delegation, Model European Parliament ×2AFNORTH International School
05 Off the clock
Fourteen years at the piano.
Long enough to get through La Campanella and Le Torrent, which mostly taught me that hard things yield to stubbornness spread over years rather than talent applied in bursts. It's the same lesson research keeps teaching me, only louder.
More performances →06 Reach out
If any of this looks interesting, I'd like to hear from you. Fastest way to reach me is email — I answer within a day.
© 2026 Davi Klitz · built in New York · last updated 2026