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Rodrigo Villar
Thinker, Developer

About Me

My name is Rodrigo and I am currently a 4th year student at Cornell University. I am double majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics.

Outside my academic studies, I am deeply interested in the fields of blockchain and distributed systems. My interests currently lie in virtual machines; having studied the implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and its applications (i.e. smart contracts) for some time, I now focus on alternative virtual machine architectures. In the past, I've also focused on Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and the mathematics behind Automated Market Makers (AMMs).

In my free time, I enjoy taking my dog Lucho on walks and practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

"A stone thrown in the air: nothing bad for it on the way down or good for it on the way up."

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9:17

Experience

Developer Relations Intern - Ava Labs (July 2023 - November 2023)

Most of my internship revolved around building out Avalanche Academy. In particular, I contributed heavily to both the Customize the EVM course and the upcoming Introduction to Solidity Programming course.

Additionally, I rewrote the majority of the Rust documentation on the Avalanche documentation page and implemented a prototype of ChessVM during my time as an intern.

Course Instructor - CS4998 [Blockchain Development] (January 2023 - December 2023)

I founded the first technical, for-credit blockchain course in the Ivy League. In addition to creating original course content (homeworks, slides, etc.), I am also in the process of writing a Solidity textbook to accompany the course for future iterations.

Capital Markets Intern - Crosstower

I automated the process of risk report generations at the end of each trading day for the trading desk. Additionally, I queried on-chain data to produce visual graphs for the traders to identify correlations.