About
Research: My research focuses on safe motion planning and control of robots in unstructured environments. For these problems, it is important to have a notion of how much risk a robot can take, which has led me to study coherent risk measures (CRM). My research has developed an optimal control-based planning framework for extreme, off-road environments using CRMs. This has been deployed on the robots of Team CoSTAR in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge to reduce the risk taken while planning under uncertainty.
My research goals are to develop methods for autonomy on robots that operate in complex, dynamic environments while accounting for uncertainty in a principled manner so as to provide better performance guarantees for safety-critical systems in the presence of distribution shifts.
Diversity Efforts: I have been involved with in the Visiting Scientists program by Caltech CTLO that provides classroom-based outreach by teaching weekly, hands-on science lessons at a local elementary school.
I was the CTO of Robogals Global, a student run, non-profit organization that aims to inspire and empower young women to consider studying engineering and related fields.
Education
2017 - 2023
California Institute of Technology
PhD, Control and Dynamical Systems
2013 - 2017
Georgia Institute of Technology
B.S. Electrical Engineering
Awards
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Outstanding Service as Reviewer of the IEEE Control System Letters (2022)
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Outstanding Student Paper Award at Conference on Decision and Control (2022)
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Rising Star in Data Science, The University of Chicago (2022)
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Rising Star in Robotics, Southern California Robotics Symposium (2022)
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Zenith Fellowship, DE Shaw Group (2020)
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President's Undergraduate Research Awards (PURA, 2015)