Ashleyn
Castelino
Applied AI research & engineering
Urbana–Champaign, IL
open to 2026 roles
ashleyn4@illinois.edu

Three things hold my attention: AI, financial markets and education.

Nearly everything I’ve built, written or taught sits where they overlap.

2nd — Berkeley AgentX IEEE SIEDS 2026 500+ members led 100+ users on day one $5K research grant

Work

2025 →
Applied AI Engineer Miahealth Building agentic healthcare products for users.
2026 →
Applied AI Engineer Gies College of Business, UIUC Post-training an internal open-source GPT — SFT, RL, distillation — plus the Azure pipelines it ships on. → architecture
+ what I built− less Our own Gies Chat model — post-training Qwen 3.5 into a tutor for business courses, so the model teaches the material the way the college does rather than answering like a generic assistant. Funded by a $5,000 research grant from Thinking Machines Lab. → model Magelli Force — an operating system for the Magelli office: one place for staff to find, deliver and maintain client relationships. → live Gies Chat — an open-source ChatGPT for Gies College of Business students. → live → code → demo Azure migration — moved the college’s AI apps onto Azure and built the pipelines they ship on: container registries, model endpoints and staged deploys.
+ the rest− fewer Magelli Scout, inside Force — finds sales leads for the experiential learning office, scored against the Magelli rubric, with email automation and analytics on top. Slate — project intelligence across a project’s whole life: developers keep working in GitHub, while managers and stakeholders get readable updates on progress, blockers, risks and decisions. Atlas — a visual map of the academic portfolio, using agentic graph reasoning to connect departments and the courses they teach. Venture Voice — an AI venture simulation that puts students through customer discovery before they talk to a real customer, over video and voice. → live Viva — an AI-native assessment platform where students show what they’ve learned through video, presentations and oral exams instead of another written test. → live ProjectClaw — an internal project assistant that keeps track of work across departments and inside teams.
2026 →
Founder & Lead AI Developer Healthcare & edtech startups · Champaign & Chicago, IL Software development and customer discovery, engagement by engagement.
+ what I built− less — Founded an agentic CRM for customer relationships and workflows, plus an AI deployment platform for server infrastructure and production systems. — Built a healthcare AI eval pipeline measuring medical-document accuracy, source grounding and hallucination risk for a Chicago health startup. — Shipped an LLM-powered language-learning app for an edtech startup: personalized learning and user interaction.
2025–26
Agentic AI Intern North Oil Company · Doha, QA LangGraph framework automating oil well-test analysis; RAG retrieval tuned for hallucination-free engineering advice.
+ what I built− less — A multi-agent system in LangGraph that reads well-test data — bottom-hole pressure, oil and water production, water-to-oil cut — and recommends which production zones to keep open or shut in. — A planner splits the work after the pressure analysis, then specialist agents study oil trends, water cut and efficiency in parallel before a summariser reconciles them into one zone-by-zone call. — Tiered memory: runtime state in-process, semantic recall in a vector store, past evaluations and agent messages in a document store. — An evaluation harness scoring agent recommendations against engineer-labelled ground truth, so changes to the graph could be measured rather than argued about.
2025
Graduate Research & Teaching Assistant Gies College of Business, UIUC · with Prof. Vishal Sachdev Researching and building tools that help students actually learn with AI, rather than hand the work to it — and TA’ing the course where they write the code.
+ what I built & taught− less — TA for BADM 350, business technology — debugging students’ code with them, getting them building agents in Codex, and teaching the software concepts underneath it all. — Managed the consulting projects for the supply-chain and business-consulting courses — student teams working with real clients on real business problems, from scoping through delivery. — Researched drip learning — whether course material lands better delivered in small daily doses than in one sitting. — Built BADM Bot on the OpenClaw architecture to test it: a daily bot that drips one piece of the course to students and tracks what sticks, reaching them on WhatsApp instead of the LMS. → writeup — Built MindForum — an AI brainstorming tool that keeps a human in the loop rather than handing back a finished answer. → live → code
2025
Founder & President Agentic AI @ UIUC · 500+ members Built UIUC’s first agentic-AI club: lectures, hackathons, 30+ open-source projects.
+ what I led− less — Landed the club’s partnership with Optiver, its first industry partner. — Led the lecture series alongside an exec — technical AI, agentic systems, Claude Code and the OpenClaw workshops. — Built and led a technical exec team of five. — Owned the club’s project portfolio: hosting and maintaining open-source work built internally and with outside collaborators.
2025–26

Selected projects

click any card
Text2SQL Agent team at UIUC
Text2SQL Agent 2nd — Berkeley AgentX Catches phantom tables pre-execution. 2nd place, hardest track at Berkeley’s AgentX–AgentBeats. python / sqlglot / duckdb / sqlalchemy / flask / docker
ARC Capital personal project A macro hedge fund that runs 24/7: agents trade off fundamental and alternative data — Fed speeches, X and prediction markets — instead of waiting for a desk to open. python / langgraph / typescript / react / docker
Resrv client project · solo · under 3 weeks Built and delivered to the stakeholders on my own, start to finish. Autonomous lab booking with human-in-the-loop overrides; 100+ users on demo day. python / fastapi / discord.py / typescript / sqlite
UrbanOps open source · with the club Agentic operations for city-scale workflows. typescript / python / react / docker
+ show more− show less
Aegis Data Intelligence open source · MIT Agents that catch schema drift, diagnose root cause and propose the fix. python / fastapi / langchain / typescript / react / docker
Slicky personal project Screenshot anything on your Mac, get an instant explanation — and a knowledge library that builds itself. typescript / rust / tauri / react / python
FocusTabs personal project Chrome extension that reads your open tabs against what you’re working on, suggests what to close, and archives everything so nothing is lost. javascript / typescript / chrome mv3 / llm api
NexusAI Keywords AI (YC W24) hackathon · 24 hours Company knowledge scattered across GitHub, Jira and Slack, pulled into one queryable system. Graph traversal plus embeddings — more grounded than either alone — answered by voice or chat, with a team-analytics view on top. python / typescript / graph + embeddings
CogniMap VisaVerse AI hackathon · team of 2 Course platforms teach everyone the same way. CogniMap reads what you already know from your background and career, then generates the modules for the gap that’s left. typescript / gemini / google ai studio
Super Ralph
Super Ralph personal project An autonomous agentic loop for Claude Code: it decomposes a request into tasks, writes strict tests first, implements with fresh sub-agents, debugs itself cold when stuck, and logs what it learned from every run. → code claude code plugin / agents / shell
SonicScout personal project An AI-native venture analyst: onboard a fund’s thesis once, hand it a startup URL, and five specialist agents return an investment memo in about 90 seconds — pass, watch, take the meeting, or invest. typescript / agents / web3
MedAgent paper, IEEE SIEDS 2026
MedAgent IEEE SIEDS 2026 · peer-reviewed Health search with citations, confidence scores, and stated uncertainty. python / pgvector / postgres / openai / networkx

Press & mentions

2025 → 2026
Text2SQL Agent team at Illinois
Runner-up honors in a major agentic AI hackathon Gies College of Business · news Coverage of Text2SQL taking second in the hardest track at Berkeley’s AgentX–AgentBeats. → read the article 2026.04
AI for Impact Challenge at Gies College of Business
AI for Impact Challenge (hackathon) LinkedIn · event coverage The 24-hour agentic-AI challenge at UIUC, opened by Decasonic’s Paul Hsu. → see the post 2026
Invited lecture on global financial markets, SJEC India
Invited lecture on global financial markets St Joseph Engineering College · MBA The institution’s writeup of the lecture on global macro, emerging markets and tradable instruments. → read the writeup 2026.01
+ other mentions− less
Anthropic wordmark, Claude Builder Club hackathon
Second place at the Claude Builder Club hackathon LinkedIn · post by Keshav Dalmia A teammate’s writeup of the MCP server we built in three hours at UIUC — long-term memory, a knowledge graph over team conversations and an analytics dashboard on top. → see the post 2025

Writing

linkedin · substack
tech
finance

Talks & workshops

uiuc · gies · mia · agentic ai
tech
AI for Impact Challenge (hackathon) — host & organizer Agentic AI @ UIUC · Founder & President 24 hours, 5 tracks, real business problems — opened by Decasonic’s Paul Hsu. — Ran 5 workshops in the lead-up, from AI foundations through building multi-agent systems. — Built HackClaw, an agent that ran the event itself — logistics, participant queries and the technical questions teams hit mid-build.
2026
OpenClaw × Claude Code workshop Agentic AI @ UIUC · Founder & President The largest OpenClaw meetup at UIUC. With BuildIllinois: 70+ students each shipped a NanoClaw — a lightweight OpenClaw of their own — deployed live, with $1,000 for the best build.
2026
Agentic AI workshop — UIUC Invited by UIUC · education administration Invited by UIUC to brief its education administrators on agentic AI — what the systems actually do, and what they change for how the school works.
2026
+ read more− show less
Memory management — lecture Agentic AI @ UIUC · Founder & President How agents remember: what to keep, what to summarise and what to throw away — and why most agent failures start here. → slides (pdf)
2026
Agentic coding workshop Invited talk · entrepreneurship course, UIUC Invited into an entrepreneurship course to explain AI and agentic coding to founders: where coding agents stop being autocomplete, practical workflows, and live demos of Cognitive Swarm, HackClaw and BADM Bot. With Keshav Dalmia.
2026
The evolution of AI agents & RL Invited talk · UIUC Invited by UIUC to trace agent architectures end to end — from prompting through reinforcement learning — in one workshop. → slides (pdf)
2026
GenAI architectures — lecture Agentic AI @ UIUC · Founder & President Context engineering, end to end: RAG, MCP, single- vs multi-agent, and a teardown of how Copilot assembles context. Deck and code shared with the club. → lecture recap
2025
finance
Global financial markets: an overview Invited lecture · St Joseph Engineering College, India Invited by the MBA department: the global macro environment, emerging markets and tradable instruments, and why bond markets matter more than the room expected.
2026
FX & crypto — lecture Macro Investing Association · Founder & President Carry trades, historical FX blowups, and how crypto actually moves with macro.
2025
Market discussion — lecture Macro Investing Association · Founder & President The 50-year mortgage proposal, December rate-cut odds, and EM allocation — plus portfolio program updates.
2025
+ read more− show less
Commodities — lecture Macro Investing Association · Founder & President Hard and soft commodities under macro pressure, read through the 1973 oil crisis and the Hunt brothers.
2025
Open market discussion — lecture Macro Investing Association · Founder & President Ran it as an open floor: US–China trade, oil in the $60–65 band, and what the pods got wrong that week.
2025