Manya Phutela is a Computer Science student at UMass Amherst (BS ’25, MS ’26) with a focus on computational biology and applied machine learning. Last semester, she worked on identifying PE/PPE proteins functioning as porins in Mycobacterium tuberculosis using protein language model embeddings and domain-based methods. This semester, her work is shifting toward sparse autoencoder approaches, with continuing interests in machine learning for healthcare and computational biology.