Our Team

Ramsey Reyes, a University of Pennsylvania alum, has experience as an educator in a variety of settings. Ramsey was a full-time faculty member of The Philadelphia School, where he taught music, Spanish, and physical education, and a coach for Soccer Shots in Philadelphia. In the opera world, Ramsey has worked at the Academy of Vocal Arts, the Vienna Summer Music Festival, Opera Orlando, and Opera North. Currently, Ramsey is a professional associate in piano at the University of Pennsylvania, the music director of his Catholic Parish, a college counselor for Berton College, and an assistant conductor for the University of Pennsylvania Orchestra.

In addition, Ramsey has worked at summer programs such as the The Csehy Summer School of Music, the Philadelphia International Music Festival, and the University of Central Florida Piano Camp. He spent a summer to help lead a camp at an international school in Guatemala, where he taught math, music, and English. 

Ramsey has also attended a number of summer programs as a student -- Duke TIP, University of Florida Science Quest, LEAD Engineering at University of Michigan, and LEAD Business at Wharton in high school. He graduated from Temple University with degrees in piano performance and opera coaching. Ramsey is an avid athlete and fluent in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian. 

Tom Liu graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in physics, biochemistry, and computer science, with highest honors and distinctions for finishing top of his class in each respective department. Tom has co-taught classes in physics, statistics, and data analysis, working alongside professors esteemed in their fields as well as in teaching. 

Out of a fascination with cultures and appetite for travel, Tom has lived in cities across the globe including Montreal, Marseille, and Frankfurt, where he worked in a variety of settings ranging from research labs and biotech startups to restaurants, warehouses, and remote villages.

Tom is currently a physics PhD Candidate at Stanford University, building telescopes to be deployed to the south pole and researching the Cosmic Microwave Background with the BICEP/Keck Collaboration.

Lily Xu is a scientist, musician and dog-lover. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University, where she uses microscopes to study viruses and host proteins. Before grad school, she previously attended Washington University in St. Louis, where she graduated with degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Biology: Genomics and Computational Biology with a minor in Computer Science. As an undergraduate and graduate student, Lily has co-taught classes in microbiology, computer science, biomedical engineering, and electrical engineering.

Lily devotes her time outside of the lab to science outreach and mentorship initiatives. As a WashU undergraduate, she co-led Campus Y: Wydown Science Olympiad, a team of college students who coach a middle school Science Olympiad Team, and Frontiers Magazine, the school’s science and public health magazine. When her senior year overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-founded Learning Lodge, a free tutoring program for elementary and middle school students as a resource during lockdown. Now as a Stanford graduate student, Lily continues to stay involved in science outreach by volunteering with Adopt a Science Olympiad Team, where she coaches middle school and high school teams, and by writing tests for invitationals such as Golden Gate Science Olympiad and Stanford Science Olympiad. She is part of the Stanford Biosciences Student Association, where she serves as Fellowship Co-Chair to help graduate students with grant writing and fellowship applications. Lily also has over 5 years of experience as a College Applications Consultant for CollegeVine, then CollegeAdvisor, where she specializes in essay writing mentorship, college interviews, and STEM applications.

For fun, Lily likes to play piano, violin, and guitar and also likes to watch TV shows from the 2010s with friends. On most weekends, you can find her visiting neighborhood dogs and listening to audiobooks.

Saagar Asnani is a PhD student in Musicology and Medieval Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research joins together the disparate fields of musicology and sociohistorical linguistics in an attempt to think historically about sound in all its forms and aspects. His work centers on vernacular musical traditions in medieval Europe, particularly in France, Catalonia, and Italy, and the ways in which thinking about the way people have created sounds – from language to poetry to song – can help reach a more holistic understanding of historical figures in their social, political, artistic, and linguistic contexts. Currently, he is thinking about dialectal variation in medieval France and the ways in which music manuscripts can be analyzed (via orthography, morphology, phonology, and lexis) to more accurately construct a history of the French language(s) and how linguistic methods can be applied to musical genres such as troubadour canso and vernacular polytextual motets in order to unearth the intertwined nexuses of identity, authorship, historicity, and language of lyrical works written in the High Middle Ages. He is also very interested in material history and the chemistry of inks used in medieval bookmaking.

In addition to being a scholar of music, Saagar is also a dedicated violist, playing in the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, and enjoys the creative work of writing program notes to accompany the group’s performances. Some might consider Saagar to be a polyglot, speaking, reading, and writing in over eight languages (some in both medieval and modern forms), including French, Hindi, Korean, Latin, Catalan, Italian, and German. In his free time, he loves to cook for friends and family and watch the latest K- dramas.

Saagar earned his MA in Musicology from Berkeley in 2022, and his BA with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, where he majored in Music, French, and Biology and was the recipient of the Clifton C. Cherpack Prize in French Studies for his graduating year.

Akash Gupta-Verma is a student-athlete, comedian, and contrarian. He is also passionate about the Virtú Institute’s mission and is a living embodiment of it. As a sophomore at Los Gatos High School, he plays on the baseball team, is president of the Career Club, and does community service with the Key Club.

In his free time, he is an opera librettist, a competitive debater, a designer and teacher of a mindfulness class that was featured on Google’s well-being website, and a storyteller for Conscious Dimensions, a company that uses comic book characters to demonstrate the effectiveness of the enneagram. His hobbies include fantasy sports, chess, reading, board games, cards, and cooking.

During his time at Virtú, Akash has gotten to study the strategy behind a number of different classic board games, hone his public speaking skills by doing impromptu speaking activities, cook extensively with Ramsey and Tom, and study challenging scientific topics. In addition, he has attended summer programs at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Santa Clara. 

Currently a software engineer at Google working on Google Classroom, Allen has a unique perspective on today’s technology-driven society and how it can lead to novel pathways for education. As a technologist whose past projects have ranged from a health record system for an international NGO to a development platform for the National Museum of Mathematics (yes it’s a thing!), Allen recognizes the power of learned skills when applied at the intersection of multiple disciplines.

During quarantine, Allen has found delight in teaching himself piano, updating his reading progress on GoodReads, and improving his stir-fry.

Allen holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.