Hello! I am a recent graduate from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Linguistics. I am fortunate to have worked on two very different but exciting projects - one with the TiLab at Berkeley, advised by Grigory Tikhmirov and Samson Petrosyan, and another with the Language and Cognition Lab, advised by Terry Regier.

I am broadly interested in language and thought, language acquisition, numerical/mathematical development, and writing systems. Recently, I've been exploring efficiency in recursive numeral systems and kinship systems.

Previously, I've enjoyed working as a software engineering intern at several startups, Optum, and Veeva Systems. I am also very grateful to have spent six unforgettable semesters TAing for UC Berkeley's Data Structures (CS61B) course. For more teaching information, please check here.

Research

Re-examining the tradeoff between lexicon size and average morphosyntactic complexity in recursive numeral systems
David Yang, Terry Regier
CogSci 2025 (oral presentation)| paper| slides| code

nanoVR: Building and Simulating DNA nanostructures in Virtual Reality
David Yang*, Oliver Petrick*, Samson Petrosyan (* = Equal Contribution)
code