Alan Luo

Alan Luo graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall, a boarding school in Wallingford, CT. At Columbia Engineering, he hopes to use Computer Science to push the boundaries of human capability and expression.

Alan studies Computer Science at Columbia, with a slant towards Theory and Graphics. He's interested in asking "why", finding answers, and then asking "why" again, and delights in being continually surprised and confused.

Before Columbia, he spent a couple of years exploring his entrepreneurial slant. During COVID-19 he started working on a crypto project and eventually worked on it full-time, raising money and turning it into a full-fledged company that came be known as Dark Forest. Ultimately, he decided to leave the company to return to being a student. When he got back to campus, he applied what he learned from his time away into organizing student-run research activities and the such, working together with Prof. Tim Roughgarden.

At Columbia, in addition to his pursuits in Computer Science, he's also involved in the music scene, and considers himself as much a fledgling composer as he does an entrepreneur. On the weekends, you'll find him at one of New York City's many jazz clubs, probably pondering some odd new idea, enjoying the many fruits of the mind and spirit that New York has to offer.