I’m Kushagra Srivastava, a CS Masters student at Northeastern University specializing in operating systems and compilers. I build systems-level software and care deeply about how computers actually work.
Want to see what I have worked on?
What I Work On
My focus is low-level systems programming—the kind of work where you’re thinking about memory layouts, build systems, and why something takes 40 minutes to compile when it should take 9.
Current interests: Cybersecurity, Embedded Systems, Operating systems, compiler development, molecular dynamics simulation, LLMs as an accessibility tool, and making software that respects both the machine and the person using it.
Current Projects
Background
I’m currently pursuing my Masters in Computer Science at Northeastern University, focusing on Cybersecurity on Embedded systems, bringing my previous experience from working on operating systems and compilers. Currently, I am engaged in some Masters level projects which I will be writing more about soon.
Before this, I worked at PsiThera as a Systems/Software Developer on STORMM, a molecular dynamics framework. A majority of my contributions surrounded around UNIX Standardization, Optimization, Engineering, and making STORMM a valuable Open Source project with a low barrier of entry (from no longer needing 120GB RAM to having comprehensive documentation at hand). That role taught me a lot about large-scale scientific software and high performance computation.
I studied Computer Science at UMass Amherst (BS, Honors), where my thesis compared Rust and C++ performance at the assembly level; that paper exists in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and you can read a copy here.
I was also a Research Assistant at the LinKaGe Lab at UMass Amherst and Smith College, where I revived old CentOS systems that were hacked into; safeguarded them on a network; retrieved software from decades ago; and rewrote the library’s entire bibliography system as a web app that could be hosted on internal servers.
Lastly, I published a whole bunch of papers at UMass Amherst under the Integrated Concentration in STEM program. I have those listen on an archived version of this website. As part of iCons, I have also worked with The US Census Department, on a product called ASSERT
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu on an Intel Atom netbook in 7th grade—I wrote code on underpowered hardware because that’s what I had. That’s probably why I care so much about efficient software now.
The best is yet to come.