Zach Rentala
artist
musician
DESIGNER
DEVELOPER

About me

I am Computer Science and Cognitive Science double major at the University of Pennsylvania. I am experienced in Web Development, UI/UX Design, and Frontend Engineering through my internships at InstantShare Ltd. and Kollectiff as well as my freelance work. As an technical research assistant for Platt Labs, I developed neuroscience experiments to study effort in different economic motivations. I use Matlab to analyze EEG data to clearly communicate the results of these studies to fellow researchers and the general public.

I am also an avid artist and musician. When I am not coding or studying, you can find me on drawing or playing with my bands Not Mister Purple and the Penn Glee Club Band. My favorite artists are Vulfpeck, PUP, and Snarky Puppy.

Regardless of the project, I will bring creative solutions and diverse perspectives.

Projects

DAX

Tools: Flutter/Dart, Ethereum Virtual Machine, Figma, Gitlab

Built an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible cryptocurrency wallet that implements cutting-edge decentralized blockchain P2P messaging capabilities. I designed and implemented the UI for assets, login, messaging, and profile settings pages.

See Case Study

Not Mister Purple Website

Tools: Figma, HTML, CSS, Javascript

Designed and implemented a website for my rock band Not Mister Purple. Taking inspiration from other bands’ websites, I focused on showcasing our unique visual personality and branding while maintaining simplicity.

Check Out See Case Study

Michael Platt Website

Tools: Squarespace

Developed a portfolio website in Squarespace exhibiting research publications, consulting projects, media appearances, board positions, and online courses for Dr. Michael Platt, principal investigator for Platt Labs. I incorporated Platt Labs’ branding into the visual language of the website to emphasize cohesiveness across his different works.

Check Out See Case Study

Platt Lab Effort Game

Tools: MatLab

This video game was used in a neuroeconomics experiment which measured how a participant’s willingness to expend effort changes in cooperative versus competitive social contexts. Based on the data collected from the game, we built behavioral models.

Check Out

Big Data Analytics Final Project

Tools: Python, Pandas, Sci-Kit Learn, MatPlotLib, GeoPlot

Cleaned and combined a dataset on global temperatures and a dataset on global emissions in order to analyze how temperatures and emissions have changed over the past several centuries by region. I trained machine learning models to predict which region is selected given its temperature and emission data.

Check Out

Art + Design