About

Linkedin | Github | CV

Hello! I am a Computer Science undergraduate student at UCLA. I am interested in applying machine learning for equity and innovations in sustainability.

My experience spans climate research, machine learning, software engineering, and community organizing. Broadly, I care about climate action and social equity. I am particularly interested in machine learning for power and energy systems to make the clean energy transition more equitable. My other research interests include graph machine learning, data-driven agriculture, bioremediation.

Outside of work, I love being outdoors, whether I’m rock climbing, backpacking, hiking, or swimming. I also enjoy cooking, listening to live jazz, and playing pickleball.

Education

• University of Washington, Incoming PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• University of California, Los Angeles, BS in Computer Science, Class of 2025

Work Experience

Research Intern @ Microsoft Research (June - Sept 2024)

• Conducted a high-resolution, large-scale analysis of soil health for 270+ California farms using geospatial data
• Enabled regenerative agriculture by developing an equitable soil carbon copilot with multi-resolution, multi-modal tools to provide large-scale, localized insights for soil health with personalized stakeholder engagement
• First author on workshop paper accepted at NeurIPS 2024 as a poster
• Contributed to 1 paper in submission to Nature
• Worked with Swati Sharma, Emre Kiciman, Ranveer Chandra

Sofware Engineering Intern @ Microsoft (June - Sept 2023)

• Developed internal autoresponder that leverages institutional knowledge to provide comprehensive answers to technical questions and identify areas of improvement in documentation
• Applied machine learning and data science techniques to improve accuracy 2x

Sofware Engineering Intern @ ElectricFish (June - Sept 2022)

• Developed equity-based metric with data engineering and machine learning then conveyed metric via a full stack application with REST API integration to inform EV charger deployment strategy for utilities that serve 4.9 million power customers

Web Developer @ Empower Health (Feb - Sept 2022)

• Promoted equity in healthcare for 500+ users by developing React hook-based forms for community review platform for social impact startup

Research Experience

Research Assistant @ UCLA Scalable Analytics Institute (March 2023 - Present)

• Analyze fairness implications of knowledge distillation from graph convolutional networks to multilayer perceptrons for the task of node attribute classification with sensitive attributes on natively graph data
• Working with Professor Yizhou Sun, Arjun Subramonian

Research Assistant @ UCLA Mahendra Lab (June 2021 - March 2023)

• Aided data analysis for the lab’s California Water Board per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) project
• Reviewed scientific literature regarding bioremediation
• Became proficient in Mothur bioinformatics software

Research Assistant @ Stanford Fendorf Lab (August 2020 - June 2021)

• Conducted data visualization in Excel for Fendorf Lab Ph.D. candidate’s California wildfire research to measure the public health risks of wildfires regarding hexavalent chromium and other elements
• Analyzed data in Excel to show increased manganese soil concentrations post-wildfire

Independent Student Researcher @ Los Altos High School (August 2020 - June 2021)

• Synthesized academic literature to inform experimentation on fungal bioremediation
• Developed research proposal, experimental cell culture protocols, abstract
• Integrated mutagenesis, electrostatic interplay, and surface interactions to improve biodegradation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET plastic) by filamentous fungal enzyme Aspergillus Oryzae

Publications

• Capetz M., Sharma S., Padilha R., Olsen P., Kiciman E., Chandra R. Enabling Adoption of Regenerative Agriculture through Soil Carbon Copilots (NeurIPS 2024 Workshop Poster Paper, Climate Change AI Tackling Climate Change with ML Workshop)
• Capetz M., Chance C., Pattichis R., Vinella A. Ghosh R., Chang K. Leveraging Language Models to Detect Greenwashing (2023) (Accepted to Southern California Natural Language Processing 2024)
• Oskouie H., Chance C., Huang C., Capetz M., Eyeson E., Sarrafzadeh M. Leveraging LLMs and Topic Modeling or Toxicity Classification (Accepted to Computing, Networking, and Communication Workshop 2025, at the International Conference on Computing, Networking, and Communication)
• Large scale Soil carbon estimation using sentinel 2 (In submission to Nature)

Projects

• Predicting California Grape Cultivation Conditions in the Era of Climate Change and Wildfires (December 2023)
• KaoGPT (March 2023)
• Carbon Conscious Cooking Cookbook(October 2020)

Honors and Awards

• James N. Harger Scholarship in Engineering, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, September 2024
• AV Balakrishnan Endowed Scholarship Fund, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, September 2023
• Rivian Scholarship, Rivian via SWE @ UCLA, June 2023
• Esther Williams Endowment Scholarship, Society of Women Engineers Santa Clara Valley, May 2023
• SWE Los Angeles Section Scholarship, Society of Women Engineers Los Angeles, March 2023
• Dr. Vincent Ho Scholarship in Engineering, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, December 2021
• 2nd, Biological Science Engineering Category, Synopsys Science & Technology Championship, March 2021
• 5th, Senior Biochemistry Molecular Biology Category, California Science & Engineering Fair, March 2021
• Esther Williams Endowment Scholarship, Society of Women Engineers Santa Clara Valley, March 2021

Leadership

• External Vice President, Society of Women Engineers @ UCLA, May 2023 - 2024
• Technical Director / QWER Hacks Director, Society of Women Engineers @ UCLA. May 2022 - 2023
• Outreach Officer, ACM AI @ UCLA, May 2022 - May 2023

Press

• Bruins code in QWER Hacks to combat persistent LGBTQ+ inequalities, Daily Bruin (2023)
• Community Highlights: Meet Margaret Capetz of QWER Hacks, VoyageLA (2023)
• 24 Hours of Queers, Coding, and Technology: QWER Hacks 2023, Outwrite News Magazine (2023)
• Undergraduate Student in Mahendra Lab Awarded Several Scholarships, UCLA Samueli Civil & Environmental Engineering (2022)
• Los Altos High School senior publishes plant-based cookbook, Los Altos Town Crier (2020)
• Excerpt in Bill McKibben’s column, The New Yorker (2020)
• Senior Margaret Capetz’s cookbook makes sustainability delicious, The Talon (2020)