About

About me

High school student at The Lawrenceville School, working on projects in physics, computation, and energy.

Austin Amissah, high school student at The Lawrenceville School

Austin Amissah

The Lawrenceville School, Class of 2027

I was born in New York and grew up in Connecticut and New Jersey. In addition to English, I can hold a conversation in Chinese, French, and Spanish. On this site, I show the projects I work on. Two I started on my own: a battery that has to charge at the right time, and a circuit that has to produce the right answer. The third came with my internship: a furnace that has to hit the right temperature. Problems like these grade your work for you: when the program is wrong, the bill goes up, the test fails, the metal never melts.

I began by reading broadly about energy systems, then narrowed to a research project on quantum computing for solar storage. This summer I am fortunate to be at Brookhaven National Laboratory as part of the High School Research Program.

See what I am building

Beyond the lab

More than research

I have been playing soccer since I was four. These days I play varsity soccer in the fall and run varsity track in the spring at Lawrenceville (the Big Red). Practice takes up a real part of my week, and I like it that way: it is the one part of the day where the only thing that counts is what you do right then.

This summer I also got to climb in Yosemite.

Austin Amissah resting on a granite slope in Yosemite, with cliffs behind
Yosemite, summer 2026. Photo by my sister, Dylan.

Journey

How I got here

  1. July 2025

    Launched this site

    Began documenting my exploration of energy systems and sustainability.

  2. January 2026

    Focused my research

    Narrowed to one question: can quantum computing optimize home solar and battery storage?

  3. January to June 2026

    Learned the tools

    Spent the spring learning the tools these projects rest on and setting up my laptop and this website to build and run on my own.

  4. July 5, 2026

    Solar: first working solver

    Got the battery planner solving a sample day three ways, by brute force, dynamic programming, and QAOA, and confirmed all three agree.

  5. July 6, 2026

    Brookhaven National Laboratory

    Started the High School Research Program, a six-week internship, and kept building both projects on nights and weekends alongside it.

  6. July 7, 2026

    Solar: real sunlight

    Swapped in real hourly solar generation for Golden, Colorado from NREL’s PVWatts model.

  7. July 8, 2026

    Solar: real prices

    Fed in Xcel Energy’s actual time-of-use electricity rates from the Department of Energy’s public rate database.

  8. July 8, 2026

    Solar: measured the quantum method

    Ran the first head-to-head study of QAOA against the exact answer, on problems from 2 to 6 time slots.

  9. July 9, 2026

    Solar: a real home, a real number

    Added real household usage from NREL’s ResStock and ran the first full real day, where the battery plan is worth $1.93.

  10. July 9, 2026

    Solar: staged the hardware run

    Tuned the circuit on the simulator and wrote down my predictions and analysis before spending any real quantum-machine time.

  11. July 9, 2026

    ECDSA: reproduced the frontier

    Got the challenge harness building on my ThinkPad and validated the community circuit against all 9,024 test points.

  12. July 10, 2026

    ECDSA: found the floor

    Profiled where the cost lives and tested every optimization lever I could reach, finding each already at its limit.

  13. July 11, 2026

    Solar: ran on a real quantum computer

    Sent the four smallest circuits to IBM’s ibm_fez processor and recorded exactly what survived the noise.

  14. July 11, 2026

    ECDSA: mapped the frontier

    Surveyed the reversible-inversion literature and confirmed the circuit sits at its two-inversion cost floor.

  15. 2027

    Graduating

    The Lawrenceville School, Class of 2027.

Toolkit

Technical skills

Programming

PythonRustGit / GitHubJupyter

Scientific computing

NumPySciPyMatplotlib

Quantum

QiskitQAOAReversible circuits

Domains

Energy systemsOptimizationCryptographyPhysics

Disclosure

How this work gets made

I build with an AI assistant, Claude Code. It helped me write and debug code in both projects, draft and revise the words on this site, and check the numbers I publish against the data in my repositories.

The judgment calls are mine: what to build, which experiments to run, what to claim, and what to leave out. The runs happened on my laptop and my own IBM Quantum account, and when something on these pages is wrong, that is on me, not the tool.

Working this way is also how I learn. I ask, it explains, I push back, and then I verify, because my name is on the result.