First Place
PayPerPlay
1st Place — Best Use of Solana
Per-second USDC micropayments, settled on-chain during the demo. Real money, no testnet.
Dartmouth College · Hanover, NH
Selected works · 2020 — 2026
ManasMehra
I build things that move money, models & machines — and photograph what is left over.
- 3
- Hackathons entered
- 1
- First place finishes
- 12
- Projects catalogued
IRoom I · The Artist
A student of things that resist intuition
Mathematical Computing and Statistics & Data Science at UMass Amherst — with a hardware habit that predates all of it.
I am a student of mathematical computing and statistics at UMass Amherst, which is a formal way of saying I like problems that resist being solved by intuition alone.
The work splits roughly three ways. There is the blockchain side — per-second payment rails on Solana, real USDC settling on-chain. There is the statistical side — hierarchical models, supervised learners, and a reinforcement-learning agent I built from matchboxes and first principles before I let myself use a library. And there is the building side, which started with an Arduino on a bedroom floor in 2020 and produced a paper in an engineering journal by the time I was seventeen.
Photography is the counterweight. It is the only part of the practice where I am not trying to optimise anything.
Every project here started the same way: something looked interesting, and nobody had told me I was allowed to build it yet.
Portrait, four states — & the plates that make them.
- Hackathons entered
- 3 Yale · UMass · Dartmouth
- First place finishes
- 1 Best Use of Solana
- Projects catalogued
- 12 2020 — present
- Merit awarded
- $64K Chancellor's Scholarship
IIRoom II · Selected Works
Four things I made on purpose
Payment rails, a story engine, a scheduling algorithm and a machine built out of matchboxes. Each plate is generated from the work it describes.
Three hackathons & what came back
2025
Sir Alibi
Top Project
A generative alibi engine with streaming responses and a 3D stage to act them out on.
Yale University · New Haven, CT
2025
Crewlytics
Hackathon Entry
Team bottleneck detection built on a matching algorithm written from scratch that weekend.
UMass Amherst · Amherst, MA
The rest of the catalogue
011Rasc-March Survey PlatformFull-stack web · Form pipeline2025
IIIRoom III · Practice
Tools, and where they were actually used
Hover any of these and it will tell you which project it earned its place in. Nothing here is listed for decoration.
Solana Web3.js— PayPerPlay — real USDC on-chainUSDC / BigInt precision— PayPerPlay — 6-decimal settlementChrome Extension MV3— PayPerPlayOn-chain transaction design— PayPerPlayPython— Six catalogued projectsScikit-learn— Cancer predictor, FanPowerXGBoost— FanPower MLSPyTorch— MENACE, courseworkPandas + NumPy— Every data project hereR + tidyverse— NCAA hierarchical modelslme4 / mixed models— Environmental analytics consultingAWS SageMaker— FanPower MLS deploymentStreamlit— Cancer predictor, FanPowerSQL (MySQL)— Coursework, survey platformTableau / Power BI— Consulting deliverablesTypeScript— Sir Alibi, Crewlytics, PayPerPlayReact— Sir Alibi, this siteNext.js— This siteNode.js + Express— Sir Alibi, PayPerPlayServer-Sent Events— Sir Alibi streaming backendThree.js— Sir Alibi, hero fieldJava— CourseworkC / C++— Embedded hardware projectsUnity + C#— Endless Runner, black hole gameArduino / Raspberry Pi— Eight hardware buildsBlender— 3D modellingPhotography— The room next doorGenerative art— Every background on this site
IVRoom IV · Record
Where the work was done for someone else
Consulting, mentoring, and the awards that paid for the tuition.
Sept 2025 — Jan 2026
Client engagement · team of four
Data Science Consultant — Environmental Analytics
- Analysed 1,200+ NCAA Division I football games across 30 Power Five programmes
- Built hierarchical linear models in R separating game-day effects from institution-level effects
- Produced a publication-grade analytical manuscript as the deliverable
RQuartotidyverselme4ggplot2
Feb 2025 — Present
UMass Amherst
Peer Mentor
- Selected as one of 25 from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants
- Supports 600+ first-year students across the programme
- Built the Rasc-March survey platform to replace ad-hoc data collection
Full-stack webSurvey design
Honours & awards
Highest merit awardChancellor's Scholarship — $64,000
Admitted to the National University of Singapore, ranked #8 globally for Computer Science
Dean's List — Fall 2023, Spring 2025, Fall 2025
Directed Readings Program — research apprenticeship with a PhD candidate
Commonwealth Honors College
STEWARDS Award — UMass Amherst Foundation
School Topper, CBSE Class 12 — 99/100, Distinction
1500 SAT · AP Scholar with Distinction · 36 AP credits entering college
Published in the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology, July 2022
VRoom V · The Archive
Everything I made before anyone was watching
A teenager with an Arduino, a tripod and a Blogspot account. Between 2020 and 2022 this produced seven films, fourteen posts and one published paper.
Moving image
A robotic car that reads the room with an ultrasonic sensor and steers itself around whatever it finds.
A Unity game built for the Atal Tinkering Lab Space Challenge, teaching black hole physics by making you fly through it.
An HC-SR04 distance sensor on a servo, sweeping a room and plotting returns — a radar display built from two components.
A NEO-6M module wired to an Arduino to log position — the whole thing small enough to carry.
A DIY RC car driven over Bluetooth from a phone, with no proprietary remote anywhere in the loop.
An LCD keypad lock on an Arduino — built, as the blog post admits, largely to lock out a pesky sibling.
You are also a battery. A demonstration that two dissimilar metals and a pair of damp palms will move a needle.
VIRoom VI · Photography
The one thing here I am not optimising
A hanging of nine. The full exhibition is through the next door.
18 plates catalogued. More on VSCO.
VIIRoom VII · Contact
Leave a note at the desk
Open to internships, research and anything that involves building something that has not been built yet.
Or find me in the usual places & write directly.
mmehra@umass.edu