Darshon Singh
Darshon Singh is a first-generation college student studying electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, graduating in May 2028. He grew up in Butte, Montana.
Early life
Singh grew up in Butte, one of the largest Superfund sites in the country, where decades of mining left lead in the soil and the hills bare. In high school he researched what was in the mine-contaminated water and led students in planting 3,500+ trees to help restore the land. Growing up there is why so much of his work since has been for nonprofits and causes he cares about. He also placed at state in debate on a team with no funding.
Work
In the summer of 2025 he and two teammates built Cling-E in Tokyo, an autonomous robot that follows a person around. It is now on display at Rice's OEDK. That fall he was a TA for Rice's prototyping course, where he trained 50+ students on the shop tools and built an AI teaching assistant for the course material. In November 2025 he won first place, solo, at the Claude Builder Club hackathon with MBAi, an app that sets up a business as a team of AI employees.
In 2026 he met the founder of a national nonprofit on a networking call, pitched a mentor-matching system, and shipped it for their 10,000+ advisors and students, and calls went up 50%. That summer he was an AI engineer at OpenStax, Rice's free textbook nonprofit, on a 5-person team turning textbook sections into animated videos. He fine-tuned a video model on one consumer GPU and took clip success from 5% to 95%.
He leads the Rice AI Alignment Lab, and this semester he coordinates the 26 grad student projects in ELEC 631 on what textbooks look like after AI. He runs his own GPU server at home.
He also likes building small tools for people he meets. He made OwlGuessr, GeoGuessr but for Rice's campus. Go play it. While backpacking Europe in 2026, he shared a hostel in Venice with a guide who runs hiking trips in the Dolomites for Korean travelers. He asked him to walk through how he works, saw that Korean addresses had to be reordered by hand for an English form, and built him a Chrome extension that does it for him, in exchange for a free dinner. For a jewelry store in Antwerp, he made a ring designer where a customer describes a ring and sees it in 3D. He also built an iPad play tracker for his brother, who coaches one of the top high school football teams in the nation.
Personal life
Singh is currently making a video on how MMORPG economies work. He grew up on video games, likes hiking, and has backpacked Japan, Southeast Asia and Europe by himself for months at a time, which taught him to be comfortable alone and scrappy when things go wrong. His main goal is to build cool things and get really good at solving hard problems.