Aditya Kothari Read the paper

Aditya Kothari

I’m a senior at the Academies of Loudoun in Ashburn, Virginia. I build robots and drones, teach robotics to kids, and use network science to study how the U.S. Senate votes.

Aditya Kothari at sunset by a lake

Research

Party Cohesion and Cross-Party Antagonism in U.S. Senate Co-Voting Networks, 50th–119th Congresses

Aditya Kothari. Latest version, October 13, 2026. 13 pages.

I turned every Senate roll call from 1887 to today into a network. Two senators are linked as allies if they voted together more often than not, and as opponents if they didn’t. Sorting those links by party pulls apart two things that a single polarization score blends together: how united each party is, and how strongly the parties oppose each other.

I did this work as a research assistant in Dr. Lenwood Heath’s complex networks group at Virginia Tech.

99.5%
of Democrat–Republican pairs in the current Senate mostly vote against each other, up from a low of 45% in 1931–33.
r ≈ 0.29
between Democratic and Republican unity. How united one party is says little about the other.
r ≈ 0.95
between a party-blind triangle count and cross-party opposition. When the Senate splits into two camps, the camps are the parties.

Low: 1931 Now
Share of Democrat–Republican senator pairs who voted against each other more often than with each other, for every Congress since 1887. The dotted line marks 50%. Data from the paper above. Hover over a bar or use the arrow keys to read a Congress.

Drones at George Mason

Since May 2026 I’ve worked with Dr. Mohamed Gebril at George Mason University on a five-drone swarm for precision agriculture. I secured more than $6,000 in funding to build it. Each drone carries an NVIDIA Jetson Orin that runs machine-learning models in flight to detect crop stress and invasive pests from the air.

I work across the whole system: the airframes, custom sensor payloads, the onboard software and field tests. I presented the project at a research symposium, and I advise another student on the drones’ electronics.

Projects I founded

Spark Gears Initiative

Founder and president, since 2025

A student-led nonprofit that teaches hands-on robotics (Arduino, programming, CAD and FTC) to kids 8 and up. It also gives rookie FTC teams free outreach plans, supply kits and mentoring. We work with schools in three countries, from Virginia to India.

Visit sparkgearsinitiative.org

Metal Magic

Founder and captain of FTC team #23362, since 2023

A FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team from Ashburn. We design, build and program a new competition robot every season, and we’ve ranked 6th of 267 teams in the Chesapeake region and 290th of 7,239 teams worldwide.

Visit metalmagicftc.org

Other experience

  1. Summer 2026

    NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

    Optical sensor and GN&C intern in the Space Club Scholars program, one of 30 selected from about 1,900 applicants. I found that a liquid lens’s self-heating was shifting its distortion, designed thermal experiments, and helped build a model that predicts the distortion from temperature.

  2. 2026–now

    FIRST Chesapeake Youth Advocacy Council

    Officer on the council’s first support and training committee. I’m working with Virginia legislators to grow the STEM+C robotics grant from $200K to $660K, enough for every school district to support a team.

  3. 2026–now

    Virginia Tech, complex networks research

    Research assistant to Dr. Lenwood Heath. Besides the Senate paper, I built network models to compare COVID-19 vaccine allocation strategies.

  4. 2025–now

    Curie Learning and the Dauntless Dragons

    As robotics program lead at Curie Learning I’ve taught about 90 students aged 8–15 and directed about $6,000 I earned to robotics nonprofits. I also started and coach the rookie FTC team Dauntless Dragons.

  5. 2024–26

    Personal builds

    An autonomous drone that scans container tags and lands on AprilTag markers, a 3D-printed prosthetic that lets people with partial hand amputations play fingerstyle guitar, and a solar tracker that harvested 23% more energy than a fixed panel.