Alejandro José Soto Franco

Maths · Rust · CUDA · Quant

Holonomy Securities

I trained as a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins, where research on active matter pulled me into differential geometry and PDE theory, and into a PNAS paper on topological defects that braid themselves into periodic orbits. That love for complex systems shaped by their geometry and topology shapes everything I build. I now lead Holonomy Securities, a three-person systematic trading firm, maintain open-source Rust libraries for geometric computing and stochastic analysis, and formalise analysis in Lean. Away from the desk I cook, DJ, lift, mod Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, and play Risk of Rain 2.

LinkedIn →GitHub →arXiv →Email →

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Experience

Jun 2026 – present	Ishaya and Associates HPC and ML Associate Remote	Model development and the high-performance computing beneath it for reservoir and petrophysics engagements. Gaussian-process regression, kriging with conditional simulation, and conformal prediction for calibrated P10 to P90 uncertainty, with GPU pipelines in Rust (Burn) and Python, plus a 3D Darcy-flow reservoir model. Designed the leave-one-well-out cross-validation that exposed data leakage in naive splits.
Jun 2026 – present	LOT, Ingeniería y Tecnología Petrolera Consulting CFD Engineer Remote, Saltillo, Mexico	The computational fluid dynamics campaign for a patent-stage pump: boundary conditions, CAD geometry refinement, and compressible high-speed multiphase flow tuned for gas-liquid mixing against inlet backpressure. OpenFOAM with bespoke Rust CFD tooling, geometry in a Rust CAD kernel, meshing through Gmsh. Under NDA.
Dec 2025 – present	Holonomy Securities Founding Principal Remote	Co-founded a systematic trading firm, three people, building quantitative engines across prediction markets and equity options on a shared Rust substrate. Built Colosseum, a multi-asset backtesting and execution platform with a WASM strategy sandbox, CLOB-native market data, configurable fill models and a full audit trail, and Polybius, a Polymarket-native binary-options system with non-stationary SDE regime models. Architecture, GPU and async systems, risk modelling, and production operations on AWS.
Aug 2025 – Oct 2025	Anti Capital Rust Trading Strategies Developer New York, NY	Spot automated market-making strategies for crypto tokens on a Rust trading engine. Shipped a pre-debit balance guard that eliminated insufficient-balance order rejections across a multi-exchange execution stack. Tokio, WebSockets, and a lock-free actor model where each actor owns its state and communicates over channels.
Dec 2023 – May 2025	Johns Hopkins University, Physics and Astronomy Research Assistant, Beller group Baltimore, MD	Active-matter physics in confined two-dimensional active nematics. Second author on the PNAS paper showing that +1/2 topological defects lock into periodic orbits whose periodicity follows the metallic ratios, with chaotic mixing read through the Burau representation of braid groups. Built the braid-classification pipeline, Python first and later ported to Rust.
Jan 2022 – Feb 2024	Johns Hopkins University, Institute for NanoBioTechnology Research Assistant, Mao-Schneck laboratory Baltimore, MD	Polymeric nanoparticles for solid-tumour immunotherapy. Synthesised roughly 83.6 nm PEG-b-PLGA micelles carrying recombinant interleukin-2 and dextran-sulfate polyelectrolyte complexes, characterised size and zeta potential, and demonstrated tunable sustained release to two weeks in an analogue albumin model.

Ishaya and Associates
HPC and ML Associate
Model development and the high-performance computing beneath it for reservoir and petrophysics engagements. Gaussian-process regression, kriging with conditional simulation, and conformal prediction for calibrated P10 to P90 uncertainty, with GPU pipelines in Rust (Burn) and Python, plus a 3D Darcy-flow reservoir model. Designed the leave-one-well-out cross-validation that exposed data leakage in naive splits.
Jun 2026 – present · Remote
LOT, Ingeniería y Tecnología Petrolera
Consulting CFD Engineer
The computational fluid dynamics campaign for a patent-stage pump: boundary conditions, CAD geometry refinement, and compressible high-speed multiphase flow tuned for gas-liquid mixing against inlet backpressure. OpenFOAM with bespoke Rust CFD tooling, geometry in a Rust CAD kernel, meshing through Gmsh. Under NDA.
Jun 2026 – present · Remote, Saltillo, Mexico
Holonomy Securities
Founding Principal
Co-founded a systematic trading firm, three people, building quantitative engines across prediction markets and equity options on a shared Rust substrate. Built Colosseum, a multi-asset backtesting and execution platform with a WASM strategy sandbox, CLOB-native market data, configurable fill models and a full audit trail, and Polybius, a Polymarket-native binary-options system with non-stationary SDE regime models. Architecture, GPU and async systems, risk modelling, and production operations on AWS.
Dec 2025 – present · Remote
Anti Capital
Rust Trading Strategies Developer
Spot automated market-making strategies for crypto tokens on a Rust trading engine. Shipped a pre-debit balance guard that eliminated insufficient-balance order rejections across a multi-exchange execution stack. Tokio, WebSockets, and a lock-free actor model where each actor owns its state and communicates over channels.
Aug 2025 – Oct 2025 · New York, NY
Johns Hopkins University, Physics and Astronomy
Research Assistant, Beller group
Active-matter physics in confined two-dimensional active nematics. Second author on the PNAS paper showing that +1/2 topological defects lock into periodic orbits whose periodicity follows the metallic ratios, with chaotic mixing read through the Burau representation of braid groups. Built the braid-classification pipeline, Python first and later ported to Rust.
Dec 2023 – May 2025 · Baltimore, MD
Johns Hopkins University, Institute for NanoBioTechnology
Research Assistant, Mao-Schneck laboratory
Polymeric nanoparticles for solid-tumour immunotherapy. Synthesised roughly 83.6 nm PEG-b-PLGA micelles carrying recombinant interleukin-2 and dextran-sulfate polyelectrolyte complexes, characterised size and zeta potential, and demonstrated tunable sustained release to two weeks in an analogue albumin model.
Jan 2022 – Feb 2024 · Baltimore, MD

Education

Aug 2024 – May 2025

M.S. Biomedical Engineering

Johns Hopkins University

Admitted through Combined Graduate Study. With no course-specific requirement, the schedule ran toward advanced mathematics and theoretical physics: differential geometry, calculus on manifolds, condensed-matter and statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, computational modelling of soft and biological materials, and the mathematical foundations of data science.

Aug 2021 – May 2025

B.S. Biomedical Engineering

Johns Hopkins University

Graduated with General Honors and Departmental Honors in Biomedical Engineering, cumulative GPA 3.58 across 154.5 credits against a 129.0 requirement, carrying two multi-year research appointments in parallel.

Kam Leong Research Fellowship · John and Marion Kreutzberg Scholar · Dean’s List

M.S. Biomedical Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
Admitted through Combined Graduate Study. With no course-specific requirement, the schedule ran toward advanced mathematics and theoretical physics: differential geometry, calculus on manifolds, condensed-matter and statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, computational modelling of soft and biological materials, and the mathematical foundations of data science.
Aug 2024 – May 2025
B.S. Biomedical Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
Graduated with General Honors and Departmental Honors in Biomedical Engineering, cumulative GPA 3.58 across 154.5 credits against a 129.0 requirement, carrying two multi-year research appointments in parallel.
Kam Leong Research Fellowship · John and Marion Kreutzberg Scholar · Dean’s List
Aug 2021 – May 2025

Publications

PNAS 123, e2516670123 (2026)	Chaos-generating periodic orbits of topological defects in confined active nematics Klein, Soto Franco, et al. Second author.
Preprint, Zenodo (2026)	Configuration-space curvature and the Navier-Stokes singular set Sole author. Identifies the curvature of the L² metric on SDiff(T³) with the pressure Hessian.
Zenodo (2026)	Surgery in membrane fusion Sole author. The Gaussian-curvature term of the Helfrich energy is the only one a topology change moves, and what it counts along a fusion pathway is a surgery number.
Preprint, in preparation	ermak: GPU-accelerated Brownian dynamics for ligand diffusion and dissociation kinetics Sole author. Ermak-McCammon propagator on the GPU, roughly 43× the CPU reference in the f32 path.

Chaos-generating periodic orbits of topological defects in confined active nematics
Klein, Soto Franco, et al. Second author.
PNAS 123, e2516670123 (2026)
Configuration-space curvature and the Navier-Stokes singular set
Sole author. Identifies the curvature of the L² metric on SDiff(T³) with the pressure Hessian.
Preprint, Zenodo (2026)
Surgery in membrane fusion
Sole author. The Gaussian-curvature term of the Helfrich energy is the only one a topology change moves, and what it counts along a fusion pathway is a surgery number.
Zenodo (2026)
ermak: GPU-accelerated Brownian dynamics for ligand diffusion and dissociation kinetics
Sole author. Ermak-McCammon propagator on the GPU, roughly 43× the CPU reference in the f32 path.
Preprint, in preparation

Formalisation

Mathlib4	Closure lemmas showing that functions with compact multiplicative support form a submonoid, with follow-on results for List, Multiset and Finset products.
infinity-cosmos	Six pull requests merged into Emily Riehl’s ∞-cosmos library, covering library results, toolchain moves and CI.
EllipticPDE	Existence and uniqueness for second-order divergence-form elliptic operators through Lax-Milgram, the Gårding inequality, the complete Fredholm alternative, and interior regularity at every order. No `sorry` in the library, asserted in CI.

Mathlib4
Closure lemmas showing that functions with compact multiplicative support form a submonoid, with follow-on results for List, Multiset and Finset products.
infinity-cosmos
Six pull requests merged into Emily Riehl’s ∞-cosmos library, covering library results, toolchain moves and CI.
EllipticPDE
Existence and uniqueness for second-order divergence-form elliptic operators through Lax-Milgram, the Gårding inequality, the complete Fredholm alternative, and interior regularity at every order. No sorry in the library, asserted in CI.

Skills

GPU and HPC	CUDA (cudarc, cuFFT), Vulkan (ash, VkFFT), wgpu, PTX codegen, cross-backend FFT, zero-copy interop, SLURM
Rust	Tokio, async, rayon, serde, ndarray, sqlx, duckdb-rs, PyO3 and maturin
Lean 4 and Mathlib	Elaboration, metaprogramming, tactics, linters, DiscrTree, environment walking
Mathematics	Differential geometry, geometric measure theory, stochastic processes, functional analysis, PDEs, active-matter physics
Machine learning	Transformer fine-tuning (PEFT/LoRA), contrastive learning, knowledge distillation, FlashAttention 2, hard-negative mining
Other	Python, C++, Fortran, Julia, Fedora and Linux, LaTeX

GPU and HPC
CUDA (cudarc, cuFFT), Vulkan (ash, VkFFT), wgpu, PTX codegen, cross-backend FFT, zero-copy interop, SLURM
Rust
Tokio, async, rayon, serde, ndarray, sqlx, duckdb-rs, PyO3 and maturin
Lean 4 and Mathlib
Elaboration, metaprogramming, tactics, linters, DiscrTree, environment walking
Mathematics
Differential geometry, geometric measure theory, stochastic processes, functional analysis, PDEs, active-matter physics
Machine learning
Transformer fine-tuning (PEFT/LoRA), contrastive learning, knowledge distillation, FlashAttention 2, hard-negative mining
Other
Python, C++, Fortran, Julia, Fedora and Linux, LaTeX

Languages

Native	Spanish, English
Limited working	Mandarin Chinese
Reading	Portuguese, Italian, French, Arabic

Native
Spanish, English
Limited working
Mandarin Chinese
Reading
Portuguese, Italian, French, Arabic

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