⚠ FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY

The author is not a medical professional, legal professional, financial professional, or expert of any kind. Nothing on this site constitutes medical advice, legal advice, financial advice, or professional guidance of any nature. All content is the personal opinion and independent work of the author. Information may be incomplete, out of date, or inaccurate. Do not make any medical, legal, financial, or personal decisions based on content found here. Always consult a qualified professional. The author accepts no liability whatsoever for any action taken or not taken based on the content of this site.

Corinthian Technologies Incorporated

Building, researching, and writing at the edge of science and systems.

Independent app development, science-policy research, and consulting — plus long-form writing on the systems behind medical breakthroughs. All under one roof.

App development Bioscience research Science policy Systems thinking Consulting

Blog

Long-form analysis of bioscience breakthroughs, systems thinking, and science policy.

Projects

Software I've built, including frúto, an iOS app live on the App Store.

About

The researcher, writer, and systems thinker behind this work.

This project would not have been possible without the tools and resources that made the research, writing, and building of this site feasible for a single student. Thank you to Claude (Anthropic) for research assistance, writing support, and help constructing this website; Notion for organizing and storing the knowledge base behind every post; Google for search, Scholar, and the countless papers and sources that informed this work; and the University of Pittsburgh for its library resources, academic access, and the education that made it possible to engage with this material in the first place.

On a personal note: thank you to my mom, my cousin Gabriel, and my friend Hagen for amazing and inspiring conversations that shaped how I think about these topics. And to the Senior Knuckle Head Brigade and its entire extended family — thank you for the conversation, nourishment, distraction, and support while this project was being built. You know who you are.

⚠ ACADEMIC PROJECT — FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY

This blog is a student school project created for educational purposes. Nothing here constitutes medical, legal, financial, or professional advice. All content is the personal opinion and academic work of the author. Information may be incomplete, out of date, or inaccurate. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions based on content found here.

01
Bioscience
CAR-T for autoimmune disease: what Erlangen proved and what comes next
University Hospital Erlangen's CAR-T trials in lupus, myositis, and systemic sclerosis didn't just show remission — they rewrote what remission means for autoimmune patients.
BioscienceSystems
02
Bioscience
The first personalized CRISPR therapy: how CHOP and UPenn pulled it off
In 2025, a child with a rare metabolic disorder became the first person treated with a bespoke CRISPR gene therapy designed for their specific mutation. Here is how it happened.
BiosciencePolicy
03
Systems thinking
Framework — What It Takes for a Breakthrough to Happen
This post explores the full ecosystem required for a scientific breakthrough to occur. It is not just the science itself, but the human, financial, institutional, political, and cultural conditions that make it possible.
SystemsPolicy
04
Bioscience
The diagnosis before the cure: what an ME/CFS breakthrough actually requires
ME/CFS affects more people worldwide than MS, Parkinson's, and HIV combined — with no approved treatment, no biomarker, and a fraction of the research funding. What it would actually take to get unstuck.
BiosciencePolicy
← Back to blog
Live on the App Store

frúto

A produce price tracker for iOS. Log what you pay for fruits and vegetables, watch how prices move over time, and know when you're actually getting a good deal. Built end-to-end with Claude, backed by Firebase.

📱 Download on the App Store
3 paying users · In-app purchases live · Security hardening in progress
Grocery delivery apps and big retailers know your history, your habits, your willingness to pay. That makes it easy to price around you specifically, instead of quoting one honest number. frúto's prices come from real shoppers reporting what they actually paid, so no single person's data can quietly change what they see. It's meant to be an independent baseline that Instacart's and Walmart's personalized pricing can't touch.
Crowdsourced prices

Every price comes from a shopper logging what they actually paid, not a retailer feed. The data reflects real receipts, and no single user's activity can skew it.

What's in season

Shows what's actually in season right now, so "cheap" and "in season" line up instead of paying peak price for something shipped in off-season.

Home screen widgets

Current best prices and what's in season, right on your home screen. No need to open the app just to check.

Recipes

Browse and submit recipes built around seasonal, well-priced produce. Comments from other users turn it into cooking suggestions tied to what's actually affordable.

In-app grocery list

Build your grocery list inside the app, tied to the same price data, so planning a shop and tracking the cost happen in one place.

Receipt scanning

OCR reads prices straight off a photographed receipt. Logging what you paid doesn't mean typing it in by hand.

Swift Firebase In-app purchases App Store
In development

Remember When

An expansion on the idea behind Snapchat Memories. Record an obscure, specific memory as a short video or voice note, tag the people who were there, and let it resurface again later instead of disappearing into a camera roll.

Built on iCloud, not a server I run

Sharing runs on CloudKit. Tagging someone adds them directly to an iCloud share, the same mechanism behind Apple's own Shared Photo Library, so there's no backend to maintain and no accounts to manage.

Transcription never leaves the phone

Speech-to-text runs entirely on-device, using Apple's own on-device recognizer. What gets said in a private memory never goes to a server, including mine.

Automatic albums

Memories that share a person, a place, or a close date link into an album on their own. No folders to build or maintain by hand.

Daily resurfacing

A rotating prompt and a "remember this?" card bring old memories back into view, so they don't just sit untouched after the day they were made.

Cleaned-up audio, recorded raw

Voice memories are captured clean, then processed afterward with on-device noise reduction, EQ, and loudness normalization. A before/after toggle means nothing gets altered without your say.

Yours to keep, off the app entirely

A one-tap export builds a real archive of video, audio, and a browser-playable page. Save it to iCloud Drive or copy it onto a physical drive; it doesn't depend on the app staying installed.

SwiftUI CloudKit On-device speech SwiftData
In development

Tasklight

A to-do list app built for the way I actually plan: one app, built once, that runs natively on both iPhone and Mac and stays in sync between them.

One app, two platforms

A single codebase compiles into a native iPhone app and a genuine Mac app, not a scaled-up phone screen. iCloud keeps the two in sync.

Brain Dump

Paste or dictate a messy wall of everything on your mind. It gets parsed into separate tasks, dates and locations picked out automatically, then handed back to you to review and approve.

Runs instantly, works offline

That parsing happens entirely on-device. No AI model, no network call — just instant, and it keeps working with no signal.

Sections, projects, and tags

Tasks live in user-created sections and projects, cut across by tags. Drag-to-reorder and multi-select bulk editing make cleaning up a list fast.

Home screen widget

A Today widget shows what's due right on the home screen, pulling from the same live data as the full app rather than a stale snapshot.

SwiftUI macOS CloudKit WidgetKit

More in progress

Smaller projects and experiments. Some are apps, some are just tools I built to solve my own problem.

Larder

An offline kitchen inventory app. On-device computer vision and barcode scanning recognize groceries as you put them away, then it suggests recipes from what's actually in the fridge, prioritizing whatever's about to expire.

Universe simulators

Two takes on simulating the Big Bang. One is a physically rigorous cosmology sandbox where you tweak the actual constants of physics and watch galaxies form from a real-time particle simulation. The other is a playful arcade version where a universe can run all the way through stars, life, and civilizations before heat death.

Husklight

A hand-built exploration and story game in a Great-Wave, ukiyo-e art style. The world is built inside the corpses of skyscraper-sized insects that all died in a single night.

Local AI tools

A pair of terminal assistants I built for myself. One reads receipts and bank statements to track spending; the other searches federal grant databases for open funding and pulls contact information. Both run entirely on a free, open-source model on my own machine: no subscription, no API key, nothing sent to the cloud.

CW
Corin Winikoff
Founder · Researcher · Writer

Curious about how the world works — and how it could work better.

I'm Corin Winikoff, a physics student in the Frederick Honors College at the University of Pittsburgh and the founder of Corinthian Technologies Incorporated. My academic interests span mathematics, engineering, the life sciences, and public health. What holds them together is a persistent question: how do government, industry, and institutions shape the systems that determine outcomes for people?

CTI is where I try to think through those questions seriously, and where everything else I build lives too. The blog started with bioscience, out of a conviction that the most important breakthroughs aren't just scientific events. They're the product of funding structures, regulatory decisions, institutional cultures, and individual researchers working inside systems that either enable or obstruct them. That same lens now extends past the blog into independent app development, science-policy research, and consulting work, all under the same roof.

Outside of research, I'm an avid reader, writer, and critical thinker who wants to explore as much of the world and its opportunities as possible. I'm drawn to problems at the edge of multiple disciplines, the kind that don't fit cleanly inside any single department or framework.

Physics Mathematics Life sciences Public health Systems thinking Science policy Long-form writing Critical analysis
2024–2028

University of Pittsburgh, Frederick Honors College

Physics major, mathematics minor — expected graduation 2028. Pursuing an interdisciplinary education across science, policy, and the humanities.

Resume Education, research, experience, and skills

Corinthian Technologies Incorporated is the home for everything I build and write: independent app development, science-policy research, consulting, and this site's blog and long-form work all live under it.

Education

University of Pittsburgh · Frederick Honors College Expected May 2028
B.S. Physics, minor in Mathematics · GPA 3.95 / 4.00 · Pittsburgh, PA
  • Physics: Mechanics, Principles of Modern Physics 1–2, Thermal & Modern Physics, Analog and Digital Electronics, Modern Physics Measurements, Physics & Quantum Computing Seminar.
  • Mathematics: Honors Single-Variable Calculus, Analytic Geometry & Calculus 3, Introduction to Matrices & Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Introduction to Theoretical Mathematics.
  • Honors: Frederick Firsts — Bioscience Breakthroughs (study abroad, A+), the seminar this site was built for; Special Topics Seminar — Imagine a Brain.
  • Other: General Chemistry 1–2, Public Speaking, Seminar in Composition.
  • In progress (Fall 2026): Computational Methods in Physics, Intermediate Electricity & Magnetism, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics 1.
Taylor Allderdice High School Graduated June 2024
Valedictorian · Engineering Magnet Program · Pittsburgh, PA

Research & Projects

Directed Study in Combinatorics Spring 2025
University of Pittsburgh, with Dr. Jeffrey Wheeler
  • Investigated Stirling numbers of the first and second kind and Bernoulli numbers; presented findings at the Pitt Spring Undergraduate Research Fair (March 2025).
  • Produced academic articles and presentation posters typeset in LaTeX.
Founder 2026 – Present
Corinthian Technologies Incorporated
  • Self-directed science writing and research project covering CAR-T therapy, CRISPR gene editing, ME/CFS, and science policy.
  • Publishes long-form analysis applying systems-thinking frameworks to life sciences breakthroughs.
Eagle Scout Project — Cemetery Digitization December 2023
  • Led a team to digitize over 1,500 historical cemetery records, building a searchable online archive for public access.
  • Managed data collection workflow, team coordination, and long-term preservation strategy.

Software Projects

frúto — iOS produce price tracker 2026 – Present
  • Shipped independently on the App Store; crowdsourced pricing, receipt OCR, recipes, and a home screen widget, backed by Firebase.
Remember When & Tasklight — iOS/Mac apps 2026
  • Two apps in development: a CloudKit-backed memory-sharing app with on-device speech transcription, and a cross-platform (iPhone + Mac) to-do app with an on-device natural-language task parser.
Additional independent projects 2026
  • Several smaller apps and tools: an offline kitchen-inventory app using on-device computer vision, two Big Bang / cosmology simulators, a story-driven exploration game, and two local terminal AI assistants for personal finance and grant research. See the Projects page for details.

Work Experience

Lifeguard Summers 2023, 2024
Highland Park Pool, Pittsburgh, PA — the city's largest public pool, 100,000+ patrons per season
  • Maintained CPR and first aid certifications; executed crisis response during a critical public safety incident.
  • Monitored a high-traffic facility and enforced safety protocols across a large, diverse patron population.

Leadership & Activities

  • Vice President, Men's Club Lacrosse — University of Pittsburgh (2026–2027 season)
  • Lacrosse Captain, Taylor Allderdice High School (sophomore–senior year); Swim Captain (senior year)
  • Varsity Lacrosse and Swimming, Taylor Allderdice High School (2020–2024)

Skills

Languages & tools: Swift & SwiftUI · Python (data analysis, plotting) · LaTeX · AutoCAD (basic)

Other: Public speaking · Technical writing · Systems thinking · Science policy · Long-form writing · Critical analysis