The Catalyst GroupUC Berkeley
Team

The four people you actually work with

Two presidents, two vice presidents. Between them: AI research at MIT CSAIL, clinical drug-product manufacturing at Amgen, bench work at Berkeley Lab and the Innovative Genomics Institute, forward-deployed engineering at enterprise scale, and companies of their own — one of them piloting inside a Fortune 250.

Three of the four are in M.E.T., Berkeley’s dual degree in engineering and business; the fourth is EECS and applied math. The practical effect is that scoping and implementation happen in the same room instead of across a handoff.

4 leads12 core competencies2 presidents / 2 vice presidents
Ishita Samadhiya, President of The Catalyst Group

Ishita Samadhiya

PresidentEECS + Business · UC Berkeley M.E.T.

Leads engineering. Splits time between AI research at MIT CSAIL and shipping production systems, which is why our prototypes arrive with evals attached rather than vibes.

Core competencies
  1. 01

    Applied AI & LLM Systems

    Retrieval pipelines, agent orchestration, and evaluation harnesses that hold up outside a demo.

  2. 02

    AI Research

    Research at MIT CSAIL, translating current work into features a team can actually ship.

  3. 03

    Full-Stack & Cloud Infrastructure

    FastAPI and TypeScript services on AWS, containerised and instrumented for production traffic.

  • MIT CSAIL
  • Blue Origin
  • HP
  • Venture-Backed AI Startups
  • Founder, 1 Exit
LinkedIn
Aniruddh Mohan, President of The Catalyst Group

Aniruddh Mohan

PresidentBioengineering + Business · UC Berkeley M.E.T.

Leads client strategy. Bioengineering training plus a business core, so scoping conversations start from the science rather than from the software.

Core competencies
  1. 01

    Life Sciences & Diagnostics

    Reads the instrument, assay, and clinical-workflow context that most software teams have to guess at.

  2. 02

    Product Strategy

    Turns a broad transformation mandate into a scoped brief with a defensible success metric.

  3. 03

    Commercial Analysis

    Market sizing, competitive teardowns, and the segment-level math behind a build-or-buy call.

  • Danaher
  • NASA
  • UC Berkeley M.E.T.
LinkedIn
Harrison Tang, Vice President of The Catalyst Group

Harrison Tang

Vice PresidentEngineering + Business · UC Berkeley M.E.T.

Leads lab-facing work. Actually runs experiments on lab instruments most weeks, which shortens the distance between a proposed feature and whether a scientist would use it.

Core competencies
  1. 01

    Biomanufacturing & Lab Operations

    Digital twins and automation for clinical drug-product manufacturing workflows at Amgen.

  2. 02

    Instrumentation & Research

    Bench research at Berkeley Lab's Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Innovative Genomics Institute.

  3. 03

    Product Management

    Two years shipping product across early-stage teams, plus a biosensing system of his own design.

  • Amgen
  • Berkeley Lab (JBEI)
  • Innovative Genomics Institute
  • Masason Fellow
LinkedIn
Sritej Bommaraju, Vice President of The Catalyst Group

Sritej Bommaraju

Vice PresidentEECS + Applied Math · UC Berkeley

Leads deployment. Built a document-extraction engine now piloting inside a Fortune 250, and brings a bias toward deterministic systems where auditability matters.

Core competencies
  1. 01

    Forward-Deployed Engineering

    Embeds with enterprise teams and ships against their real data, not a sanitised sample.

  2. 02

    Document AI & Extraction

    Founded stet, a deterministic extraction engine that reconciles 90-page deal documents in seconds.

  3. 03

    Applied Math & Systems

    Prefers a provable model to a probabilistic one when the output has to be identical every run.

  • Founder, stet
  • Sr. FDE, AECOM
LinkedIn
Coverage

What the club covers

The 12 competencies above, grouped. Each line names the lead who owns it, so you can see where the depth is before the first call.

  • Applied AI & Research

    Retrieval, agents, extraction, and the evaluation work that tells you whether any of it holds up.

    • Applied AI & LLM SystemsIshita / Pres
    • AI ResearchIshita / Pres
    • Document AI & ExtractionSritej / VP

  • Engineering & Delivery

    Typed services, real deployments, and a preference for systems that return the same answer twice.

    • Full-Stack & Cloud InfrastructureIshita / Pres
    • Forward-Deployed EngineeringSritej / VP
    • Applied Math & SystemsSritej / VP

  • Science, Lab & Instrumentation

    Assays, instruments, and manufacturing workflows read from the bench rather than from a spec sheet.

    • Life Sciences & DiagnosticsAniruddh / Pres
    • Biomanufacturing & Lab OperationsHarrison / VP
    • Instrumentation & ResearchHarrison / VP

  • Strategy, Product & Commercial

    Scoping, market math, and the build-or-buy call, written by the people who would have to build it.

    • Product StrategyAniruddh / Pres
    • Commercial AnalysisAniruddh / Pres
    • Product ManagementHarrison / VP
UC Berkeley

The Catalyst Group is a student technology and strategy club at UC Berkeley, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

We are not a substitute for a large firm. What we offer is speed, technical depth, and a direct line to Berkeley research — from the same people who would be doing the work.

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