Alejandro José Soto Franco

I was trained as a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University, where research on active matter physics and fluid mechanics pulled me into differential geometry and PDE theory as the right languages for physical systems. The same Riemannian geometric framework that describes defect dynamics in curved active nematic substrates applied to price dynamics on non-stationary diffusion manifolds. That connection shapes everything I build.

My research sits at the boundary of geometric analysis, fluid mechanics, and active matter physics. The active nematics work I did at Hopkins produced a co-authored paper submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (arXiv:2503.10880), showing that +1/2 topological defects in confined two-dimensional active nematics generically lock into periodic orbits (golden and silver braids) whose periodicity is governed by metallic ratios and whose chaotic mixing properties are captured by the Burau representation of braid groups.

Professionally, I worked as a Rust trading strategies developer at Anti Capital in New York, where I shipped a pre-debit balance guard that eliminated insufficient-balance order rejections across a multi-exchange market-making execution stack. I am working on a quantitative trading engine that treats price dynamics as probability mass flow on a non-stationary diffusion manifold, using random matrix theory for real-time market regime classification.

Outside of work: I cook, DJ, lift, and play Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.