varun nukala

varun nukala

high school senior in san antonio, texas (tmi episcopal, class of 2027). researcher and builder working where computer science, environmental science, and startups meet.

research

fires — forest ignition and risk evaluation system

sole-authored deep learning model that predicts wildfire risk from high-resolution satellite imagery. a mobilenet cnn extracts features, which train mlp, knn, and random forest classifiers. independent research, no mentor or co-authors.

96.7%
validation accuracy

presented solo at ieee igarss 2026, washington, d.c. (august 2026). published in ieee xplore: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11730559. also accepted as a poster at agu26.

geospatial foundation models for flood segmentation

independent study testing whether frozen-encoder geospatial foundation models (prithvi-eo-2.0, clay) beat a fully trained u-net when labels are scarce and the test region is unseen. uses sen1floods11 in a 90-run matrix — 3 models × 5 label budgets × 3 seeds — with held-out events in somalia, sri lanka, and spain.

+0.21
water iou, clay vs. u-net (somalia, 10% labels)

key finding: at 10% labels, clay beat the u-net on every unseen event across all seeds — foundation models are not uniformly superior. accepted as a poster at agu26 (december 2026).

recognition: selected for agu's outstanding emerging presenter program and agu circles.

ventures & projects

teyra — founder and sole developer, may 2025–present

a productivity app where an animated cactus mascot celebrates completed tasks and sustainable habits. built solo with react and django.

10,300+
users
$5k
arr
2m+
impressions

funded by a $1k starseed grant. teyra.app

honeytree — creator and maintainer, june 2026–present

an open-source cli on npm that grows a pixelated forest in developers' terminals as they code and funds real trees in kenya and ethiopia. 2,500+ downloads.

slip

a free, open-source cold-email tool that sends personalized daily batches from gmail.

earlier projects

eliee. groundwork — a cli that generates persistent ai context files for coding assistants.

experience
vc in residence
lvlup ventures
jan 2026–present
research intern
ut dallas
jun–jul 2026
full-stack developer intern
san antonio museum of science and technology (samsat)
aug 2025–mar 2026
research intern
university of the incarnate word
jun 2024

lvlup ventures: source and screen early-stage startups for a ~$250m aum fund; reviewed founder pitches and relayed top deals to the investment team.
samsat: led development of an environmental-science quiz platform; in contention for a $2k grant with potential national rollout.
uiw: built an ai email spam classifier; demoed to 60+ attendees; won best overall.

honors
  • sole-author ieee igarss 2026 paper (published in ieee xplore)
  • agu outstanding emerging presenter; agu circles
  • conrad challenge
  • texas science & engineering fair finalist; biobridge global special award
  • ap scholar with distinction; national merit commended scholar
  • yale young global scholars (yygs)
  • runner-up, national armed drill championship (nighthawks jrotc armed drill team)
  • eagle scout with bronze palm; order of the arrow (brotherhood)
  • deca state qualifier; academic worldquest, 4th place (district)