About Me

Born and raised in Durbanville, South Africa, my early passion for mathematics, physics, and chemistry naturally guided me toward engineering. I pursued my undergraduate studies at Stellenbosch University, where I joined the newly established Data Engineering specialty of E&E, forming part of only the second class to ever take on the program. This unique focus blended traditional Electrical and Electronic Engineering with Computer Science and Mathematical Statistics, giving me a rigorous foundation in Machine Learning and Software Engineering. After many challenging but rewarding late nights, I graduated among the top of my class.
Fascinated by the field of Machine Learning and driven by a desire to push the boundaries of the field, I transitioned into academic research. Today, I am a Master's student under the supervision of Prof. Herman Kamper within the Stellenbosch Engineering MIH MediaLab. Our research group specialises in unsupervised audio and speech processing. My specific work centers on voice conversion - particularly one-to-fictional character generation. By analysing how speech is represented and how these representations encode speaker identity, I develop simplistic techniques to manipulate a speaker's characteristics. Ultimately, this research has exciting applications across the entertainment and gaming industries, as well as in privacy, security, and voice anonymisation.