about
I’m a first year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at UPenn’s GRASP Lab advised by Michael Posa. I’m lucky to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
My main interests are in intelligent robotic manipulation: I think a necessary part of bringing robots to the real world is allowing them to interact with their environment in interesting and dynamic ways, even if they are uncertain or uninformed about their surroundings (or about themselves!).
Specifically, I want to enable robots to plan through complex contact (non-prehensile and whole-body contact, dynamic uses of friction, exploitation of object deformation, tool use, etc) in unmodeled and cluttered scenes, in a way that is robust and deployable across robot hardware.
I was MIT class of 2024 studying Mechanical Engineering with a focus in Learning Machines and Physical Systems, and a minor in math.1 There, I did work on deep learning for robotic manipulation with the Improbable AI Lab and soft robotic sensing with the Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT CSAIL, and bipedal robotic control policies with the Biomimetic Robotics Lab in the MIT MechE department.
Outside of school, I dabble in various art forms (talk to me about painting, comics, mending, and puppetry!). At MIT I was involved in the music and acapella scene.
engineering/research interests
- relationship between robot morphology and task/motion affordances
- contact-rich, non-prehensile, and whole-body robotic manipulation
- planning under uncertainty and robust perception
- contact dynamics-informed learning and control
- data efficient learning
- mechanics of contact, mechanics of the continua, and mechanical fatigue
- applications: ecological surveying and intervention, assistive home, unstructured warehouse work, emergency response
other passions
- education accessibility / access to STEM
- public access to research, the open source movement
- housing and healthcare equity + the politics of displacement (both local and international)
- environmental justice and sustainability
- queer and intersectional studies (see my current reading list)
I currently live in West Philly but I come from Newark, California2 in the SF Bay Area. I’m okay with any pronouns, but I tend to go by they/them. I am a serial sock mismatcher.