Rhea Senthil Kumar is a graduate student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She earned dual B.A. degrees in Computer Science and Astrophysics from UC Berkeley, where she worked on high-energy astrophysics missions at the Space Sciences Laboratory. As part of the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) collaboration, she developed machine learning methods for gamma-ray event reconstruction and built open-source analysis pipelines adopted by NASA research groups. She also supported the General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) mission through software development and integration testing in preparation for its upcoming launch, with her work presented at venues including the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and the American Astronomical Society.

She later joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where she advanced signal processing methods for passive RF systems, designed operator tools to support scalable mission operations, and explored reinforcement learning approaches for coordinating distributed satellite and ground sensor networks. Her research spans instrumentation, computation, and space mission applications. Outside of research, Rhea enjoys collecting plants and reading, and she is always looking for new books and greenery to add to her collection.