Hi, my name is Humzah Merchant.

humzahm@uchicago.edu

I am a junior at UChicago, interested in research at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and finance.

I like to take a human interpretable approach to everything I work on - always understanding deeply the problem I'm working on, why it matters, and why a solution works.

I like to get things done and I enjoy hustling (an appropriate amount.) My favorite story is how I saved months of time deploying my webapp at Apollo by carefully inspecting the servers to find open, unused ports - rather then go through the long process of requesting a new one. I crashed the production servers for about an hour a few days later doing something else. I'm proud to say though, I was the only intern who crashed prod that summer because I was the only intern who got their project that far.

My Experiences:

Research Assistant with Dr. Bradford Levy (Oct 2024 - Present)

LLMs and Financial Data

We are approaching a specific problem in the analysis of financial data with LLMs from the perspective of both finance and the underlying machine learning, though unfortunately I can't share more information publicly.

Apollo Global Management - SWE Intern (May 2024 - Aug 2024)

I spent most of the summer working on one large scale webapp. The challenge wasn't technical as much as learning to push a project through demo -> dev -> production and learning to navigate the bureaucracies of a large organization.

Research Assistant with Dr. Larry Harris (Oct 2023 - Mar 2024)

Markets in "Event Time"

I worked on testing some hypotheses related to explaining asset returns as functions of trading volume. Though we didn't find what we were looking for, I did learn a lot about markets and the process of academic research.

NASA Johnson Space Center (Jun 2022 - Aug 2022 and Jun 2023 - Aug 2023)

I spent two summers at NASA Johnson Space Center through a program called the Summer Robotics Academy. The first summer I worked primarily on mechanical engineering tasks and the second summer I worked mostly on software related tasks. We also had a bomb squad inspired challenge my second summer - I was on the winning team. The challenge was focused on communications in a field in the middle of JSC, so I proposed we use my dad's T-Mobile wifi pack.