Headshot of Danny McCance

Hi, I'm Danny

CS + ECE · Cornell College of Engineering

01 — About

About Me

I'm studying Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Cornell University's College of Engineering.

Education

Cornell University, College of Engineering

BS Computer Science & Electrical and Computer Engineering

GPA: 3.90/4.00

02 — Experience

Experience

Research Intern

Paetzold Lab, Weill Cornell Medicine / Cornell Tech

Apr 2026 – Present

  • Migrated VERITAS, the lab's multi-agent LLM research pipeline, from paid APIs to self-hosted open-source models via Ollama on SLURM/Linux HPC, cutting inference spend ~$1,000/month.
  • Pre-registered hypothesis program on stroke outcome prediction (power analysis, multiplicity correction, SLURM/HPC) and a 50-run evaluation of the lab's agentic LLM analysis pipeline.

Course Consultant, CS 2112 (Honors OOP & Data Structures)

Cornell University

Jan 2026 – Present

  • Support 70+ students in the honors course; weekly office hours, labs, and coordination across 17 course staff.

Android Developer

Cornell AppDev

Oct 2025 – May 2026

  • Developed Android features in Kotlin for AppDev's campus marketplace app, working with designers and backend teammates.

Quantitative Analyst

Paragon Global Investments

Sept 2025 – Present

  • Researched residual-momentum alpha across 49 industry portfolios using rolling Fama-French time-series regressions in Python; neutralized market, size, and value exposures and backtested return persistence.
  • Built a two-venue market-data pipeline for Kalshi and Polymarket capturing 24M+ order-book rows via tiered polling and hysteresis-stabilized market selection, sustaining a 0.04% error rate.

Machine Learning Engineer Intern

OON Systems

Sept 2025 – Aug 2026

  • Fine-tuned and deployed open-source LLMs with RunPod and Ollama to power AI agents automating healthcare back-office workflows, including email triage, billing-code generation, and claim routing.
  • Built a HIPAA-compliant web service for protected health information, feeding billing-optimization models across clinic workflows.

Research Intern

Nestler Lab, Icahn School of Medicine

June 2022 – Aug 2025

  • Computational research on depression and addiction; analyzed Hi-C and epigenomic datasets (500M+ sequencing reads) in Python and R.

03 — Projects

Projects

Stroke Outcomes & Agentic-Pipeline Evaluation

A research internship at the Paetzold Lab, Weill Cornell Medicine / Cornell Tech: a pre-registered 52-hypothesis program testing whether brain imaging predicts stroke recovery beyond clinical variables, then a 50-run evaluation of the lab's published agentic LLM analysis pipeline. The evaluation's headline: runs that computed the right statistic got the right label only 21.4% of the time — and upgrading the model made labels worse — a study of evaluation design, not a replication.

NumPy/SciPy Pre-registration Power Analysis SLURM/HPC Local LLMs

Resell — Cornell Marketplace

Cornell AppDev's campus marketplace app for student buyers and sellers, live on the App Store and Google Play with 150 monthly users. The Android client is built in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose by a student team; I developed on the Android side, where I built the availability-scheduling flow — the calendar picker and availability sheet buyers and sellers use to coordinate meetups.

Kotlin Jetpack Compose Firebase Android Cornell AppDev

TimeLens

An iOS app that turns POV frames from Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 glasses into a searchable timeline of your day. Frames go to Gemini, come back as structured events, and the image is deleted immediately — no picture ever persists. A coaching layer scores deep work, distraction rate, and context switches, with events pinned to real furniture in a LiDAR room scan.

SwiftUI SwiftData RoomPlan / LiDAR Gemini Meta Wearables SDK iOS 17+

AI Agent Trust Infrastructure — Cornell Blockchain, Engineering Subteam Lead

The trust layer AI agents need to transact — identity, wallets, reputation — plus two working economies running on it, settling real crypto on-chain. Three MIT-licensed repos — AgentCred, AgentMarket, and AgentExchange — with 231 tests and six Base Sepolia transactions, each independently verifiable on Basescan.

Python Base Sepolia Coinbase CDP Streamlit MIT
Equity curve for the residual-momentum industry strategy

Residual-Momentum Alpha

Quantitative research at Paragon Global Investments, with co-author Uma Malani. Across 49 value-weighted industry portfolios from the Ken French data library (July 1963 – April 2026), the signal is a 12-1 cumulative residual return — residuals from a rolling 36-month regression on Mkt-RF, SMB, and HML — traded as an equal-weighted long-short on the top and bottom 5 industries with a one-month hold. Evaluated over 1967–2026 (706 months), it returns 9.2%/yr at 16.2% volatility (Sharpe 0.57) with 4.4% annualized alpha (t = 2.15), against a baseline that earns 10.9%/yr at 21.0% volatility (Sharpe 0.52) with an alpha that is not significant (t = 1.31). Residualization halves both the UMD loading (1.06 → 0.54) and the model R² (0.53 → 0.22). The two also diverge in crisis: the baseline takes the classic momentum crash in March–April 2009, losing approximately 38% in two months, while the residual strategy declines more gradually through 2008 without the concentrated cliff event. Robustness spans 21 variants across three lookbacks, three residualization windows, and two factor models; all six 12-1 combinations are significant.

Python Fama-French Residual Momentum Backtesting

04 — Skills

Skills

Languages

Python Java C++ Kotlin Swift R OCaml

ML / Data

PyTorch scikit-learn NumPy/SciPy pandas statsmodels

Mobile

SwiftUI Jetpack Compose

Infra / Tools

Linux Git Docker AWS SLURM/HPC Firebase Ollama RunPod

05 — Contact

Get In Touch

I'm currently looking for internship opportunities. Feel free to reach out!