About me

My name is Declan Kutscher and I recently completed my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where I worked with Dr. Xiaowei Jia on machine learning for climate and environmental systems. My thesis was on the effectiveness of in-domain pre-training for remote sensing tasks. I currently work as a Research Engineer with the Dr. Trevor Darrell’s group at UC Berkeley (BAIR) with Dr. Ritwik Gupta and as a Visiting Student Researcher in the NeruoAgents Lab at Carnegie Mellon University led by Dr. Aran Nayebi.

My research focuses on building machine learning systems that operate reliably in complex, real-world scientific settings. I work on computer vision, remote sensing, and self-supervised learning, with recent projects spanning long-sequence vision models, physics-guided graph learning, and world-model based reinforcement learning for intrinsic skill discovery. Broadly, I am interested in developing self-supervised paradigms inspired by biological learning that improve adaptability, data efficiency, and generalization in scientific domains.

Outside of research I enjoy backpacking, film, music, and cats.

Feel free to contact me at declank@berkeley.edu. I am always open to new collaborations.