Jonah Aden

[edit]Early life

The Bowl and Pitcher formation at Riverside State Park, near where Aden grew up

Jonah Keoni Aden was born on March 9, 2004, at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington. His mother was an educator who worked as both a teacher and a principal during his childhood. His father, Jeff Aden, worked in marketing for People to People Ambassadors Program during Aden's younger years before going on to found Second Watch (now Ollion Inc.), a cloud services and consulting startup. In 2024, the elder Aden purchased Nine Mile Feed & Hardware, a local business in Nine Mile Falls.

Aden grew up in Spokane until the age of eight, when his family moved to Nine Mile Falls, Washington. As a child, he was involved in cross-country, soccer, and ski racing, with cross-country becoming the sport he took most seriously by high school. He earned money through a variety of jobs during his youth, including yard work, lifeguarding, babysitting, and working for Zach Zapon's campaign for state representative in Spokane.

[edit]Education

High school

North Central High School in Spokane

Aden attended Finch Elementary School before enrolling at North Central High School, which he attended for both middle school and high school. During middle school, he was part of the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) program, a small cohort of middle school students housed at North Central. He graduated with the Class of 2022. During his time at North Central, Aden was a varsity cross country and track & field runner, earning selection to the 2021 All-Greater Spokane League 4A/3A Boys Cross Country First Team. He finished third at the District 8 3A Cross Country Championship with a time of 16:11.9, helping lead North Central to a state cross country berth.

Columbia University

In the fall of 2022, Aden enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, where he pursues a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Computer Science and minors in Political Science and Statistics. His coursework has included Advanced Programming, Data Structures, Discrete Mathematics, Computer Science Theory, Fundamentals of Computer Systems, Artificial Intelligence, User Interface Design, Databases, Engineering Software-as-a-Service, Probability Theory, Linear Regression Models, Statistical Inference, Elementary Stochastic Processes, Linear Algebra, Freedom of Speech & Press, International Politics, and Voting and American Politics. He is a member of the Columbia Space Initiative and the Columbia Poker Club, for which he built and maintains the official website. Aden is expected to graduate with the Class of 2026.

[edit]Athletics

High school

As a distance runner at North Central High School, Aden was named to the All-Greater Spokane League First Team in cross country in 2021. He set high school personal records of 2:00.36 in the 800 meters, 4:27.56 in the 1600 meters, 9:27.25 in the 3200 meters, and 15:31.77 for the 3-mile cross country distance. At the 2022 Rogers Jamboree, he opened his senior track season with a 3:16.67 for 1,200 meters and ran a personal best of 9:50.23 in the 3,200 meters.

Collegiate

Aden's Columbia Lions roster photo

Aden runs track & field for the Columbia Lions in NCAA Division I as part of the Ivy League conference. He holds a profile on World Athletics. His collegiate career has been significantly affected by recurring stress injuries, which have held him out of competition in three of his four seasons at Columbia. Despite the setbacks, he has posted personal records of 4:03.94 in the 1500 meters (set at the Larry Ellis Invitational at Princeton on May 3, 2025), 8:52.87 in the indoor 3000 meters, 4:29.68 in the indoor mile, and 15:30.38 in the 5000 meters. In cross country, he recorded 27:06.1 for 8 kilometers at the 2024 Mets XC Championship and 29:27.7 for 4.97 miles at the 2024 Fordham Fiasco.

[edit]Career

Columbia Space Initiative

The CSI SUITS mission patch

From October 2023 to October 2024, Aden served as Mission Director and Lead Developer (SUITS Lead) for the Columbia Space Initiative's team competing in NASA's Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students (SUITS) challenge. He led development of two core systems: a Heads-Up Display (HUD) for the Microsoft HoloLens 2, built in Unity and C#, which provided astronauts with navigation waypoints, suit telemetry overlays, and task checklists during simulated Mars extravehicular activity (EVA) missions; and a Local Mission Control Center (LMCC), a React dashboard backed by a Flask API, for real-time telemetry monitoring, task management, and pathfinding. The team presented their work at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Research

From May to October 2024, Aden worked as a Research Assistant at Columbia University, conducting computational research involving data analysis and software development to support academic research initiatives.

Pure

From September 2024 to August 2025, Aden worked as a Software Engineer at Pure, a venture-capital-backed startup disrupting the poker industry with legal, technical, and financial infrastructure. The company, founded by Columbia alumni Jacob Bulbulia and Harold Castiaux and backed by investors including Z Fellows with over $1 million raised, is headquartered in West Menlo Park, California. At Pure, Aden helped build a real-time multiplayer poker platform supporting concurrent game rooms, live WebSocket state synchronization, lobby matchmaking, and in-game chat using React, Node.js, and WebSockets. He contributed to architecture decisions and implemented core product features.

TicketKings

Since October 2024, Aden has worked as a Contracted Software Engineer at TicketKings, a premier ticket resale group. He builds and maintains full-stack platform features on tight timelines. Notable work includes a three-tool automation pipeline: an OCR bot using GPT-4 Vision that reads screenshots and logs sales to Google Sheets and ClickUp, a Ticketmaster scraper running four regional crawlers with PostgreSQL storage and Discord alerts, and a presale checkout bot.

[edit]Projects

Beyond his professional work, Aden has developed and published a number of independent software projects:

• History Through Art — An open-source AP Art History study platform providing free art education to students from his alma mater, North Central High School. Built with React, Tailwind CSS, and Vite, the site features over 250 curated multimedia resources and has accumulated over 450 commits. It is publicly available at historythroughart.com.
• Run Rarity — A full-stack running analytics platform that scores route uniqueness via machine learning. It integrates with Strava via OAuth2 for GPS polyline feature extraction and uses Flask, PostgreSQL, and scikit-learn.
• pokerFunctions — An open-source Python package published on PyPI (pip install pokerFunctions) for hand evaluation, Monte Carlo equity calculation, and game state management.
• Poker Equity Engine — A Discord bot running Monte Carlo simulations for No-Limit Hold'em hand equity, with an object-oriented game bank system for tracking buy-ins and cashouts.
• TicketMaster Bot — A Discord bot providing real-time event sale updates from Ticketmaster, with over 180 commits and 4 GitHub stars.
• Rubik's Cube Tutor — A full-stack educational app with interactive 3D cube visualizations, step-by-step tutorials, and progress quizzes built with React and Flask.
• Columbia Poker Club website — The official website for the Columbia Poker Club, built with React, React Router, Tailwind CSS, and Vite, deployed on Vercel.

As of 2025, Aden's GitHub profile hosts over 27 public repositories. He lists his current areas of study as blockchain technologies, cryptography, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.

[edit]Personal life

Aden resides in New York City while attending Columbia University. He is an avid poker player and a member of the Columbia Poker Club. Outside of programming and running, he enjoys exploring New York City. He maintains a personal portfolio website at jonahaden.com.