Ahmad Zafar | Stanford CS
i love studying how humans feel, think, and behave from the first principles of cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy.
i help build products, systems, and stories that resonate emotionally to inspire action.
currently spending most of my time on (apart from classes):
1. Legion: contributing to the open source parallel-computing runtime to write high performance applications for supercomputers (Prof Alex Aiken @Stanford, NVIDIA, Los Alamos, SLAC)
2. Dosti Project: co-founded and leading a track-II diplomacy movement to unite Indo-Pak youth to solve the world's biggest problems together (spun off from Stanford Indo-Pak Dosti Forum).
• hosting the 1st ever "Dosti Conference" at Stanford, Hoover Institution, inviting top Indo-Pak Diaspora leaders and students.
previously, co-founded and scaled a social venture during COVID-19's peak to connect patients with blood donors, designed an app that helped me win the Rise Fellowship (0.2% acceptance), early intern at Induced AI (Sam Altman backed $2M pre-seed), and some other side-quests. (see at Linkedin)
recent updates:
- nov-present: developing the "dosti" brand through dostiproject's social media and building momentum through content strategy (200K+ views in the launch week with $0 on ads)
- aug-present: incorporated DostiProject + developed conference structure & fundraising strategy & plan (fundraised $15k+ from Stanford Departments)
- sep-present: exploring ai-agentic solutions for improving adoption and usability of Legion.
- june-sep: spent summer as a CURIS undergrad researcher, self-learned CS149 (Parallel-Computing), and integrated external graph partitioning library with Legion.
- april-june: studied abroad at Peking University, Beijing, China.
here's my personal framework on living life:
- trying to understand and empathize with the opposite perspective in every interaction.
- going slow initially by breaking things down to fundamentals: why something works or doesn't, which then lets me make decisions and execute 100× faster later on.
- not saying no to an idea until I've explored it or know clearly why I'm saying no.
- continuing to do the things that make me forget time exists.
socials: Linkedin, X, Instagram
email: ahmadz@stanford.edu | ahmadzafar.office@gmail.com