Calin-Andrei Puscalau

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Calin-Andrei Puscalau is from Onesti, Romania and graduated from Colegiul National Dimitrie Cantemir Onesti. At Columbia, he plans to major in applied physics with a double minor in Economics and AI. In the field of physics, throughout high school, Calin earned 2 silver medals and 2 bronze medals at the Romanian National Physics Olympiad and 2 bronze medals at the National Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad. The main subfield where Calin conducted research in physics was particle physics.

Starting in September 2022, his sophomore year of high school, he began his first internship at the “Horia Hulubei” National Institute for R&D in Nuclear Engineering, within the ATLAS-CERN Romania team, where he worked to identify Higgs boson events and filter background using Minerva software. He also interpreted and analyzed huge datasets of proton-proton events in ROOT software. Building on this foundation, in the summer of 2024 he succeeded in obtaining a position in the Romanian High-School Internship Programme at CERN in Switzerland, where he built and applied Machine Learning algorithms to improve and speed up particle collision identification.

Additionally, curious about the applications of physics in bioengineering, Calin researched at the Romania National Institute for Materials Science, in the PADMME-NAQUANTA project, coordinated by Dr. Victor Diculescu, where, together with the team, he built biosensors for identifying Multiple Myeloma, an aggressive cancer type. During this internship, he not only applied physical techniques like sputtering and electrospinning to build the biosensor but also enhanced its design and optimized sputtering masks using CAD software. He has also used cyclic voltammetry to characterize the gold electrodes of the biosensor and analyzed the resistance modification of the microheater element. The research was published in the Analytica Chimica Acta journal and presented at the international conference Journee de Electrochimie.

Observing in his physics research the extent of AI in science, Calin began in March 2024 his AI-based cybersecurity internship and research at SAFETECH Innovations Romania, where he worked to improve efficiency of cybersecurity audit processes using NLP models. He built software to ease communication between auditors and clients and used ML to auto-sort audit documents, significantly reducing test time.

In his free time, Calin loves to get involved in charitable activities, and in one of these, he researched that one of the leading causes of deaths in his local rural areas is fire-related, elders who are unable to clean flammable chimney soot due to physical limitations. In September 2025, within the non-profit association “Sufletesti,” he raised funds from local businesses to support a two-part prevention initiative: a) Hired retired firefighters to regularly clean the chimneys and b) Rebuilt homes damaged by fires in collaboration with civil engineers. The project gained national attention and was featured on the biggest Romanian TV channel.

Besides this, Calin adores skiing, movies (especially when it comes to David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, or Ingmar Bergman), traveling, and is passionate about niche perfumery. At Columbia, Calin plans to continue in cutting-edge research in physics, to explore as much as possible the boundaries between physics and AI, and one new field he is particularly keen to grow in is quantitative finance.