Principal Investigator
PhD Students
Master's Thesis Students
Mateusz Jaszczuk
M.S. MEAM, 2026
2024–present
Thesis: “Learning to Feel: Force-Aware Data-Driven Estimation and Control for Fluid Physical Interaction”
Ekaterina Skorniakova
M.S. Robotics, 2026
2023–present
Thesis: “Coupled Passive Dynamical System Interaction Control on SE(3)”
Natey Kim
M.S. Robotics, 2026
2023–present
Thesis: “Real-time Human Limb Dynamics Tracking via HD-sEMG driven Musculoskeletal Digital Twin Modeling”
Yihan Li
M.S. Robotics, 2026
2025–present
Thesis: “RoboHockey: A Robotic Benchmark for Dynamic Whole-body Contact-rich Tasks”
Felix [Yuchen] Zheng
M.S. Robotics, 2026
2025–present
Thesis: “Object-centric 3D Operator World Models for Planning Common Cooking Tasks”
Master's Research Interns
Research Engineers
Undergraduate Researchers
Alumni
Research Engineers
| Name | Degree | Years | Next step / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jalaj Shukla | M.S. MEAM, 2025 | 2025 | Senior Software Engineer at Blue Sky Robotics |
| George [Jiayuan] Gao | M.S. Robotics, 2025 | 2025 | Research Engineer at Dyna Robotics |
| Yi-Hsuan Cheng | M.S. Robotics, 2025 | 2025 | ML-AI Robotics Engineer at RoboForce |
| Davin Tjandra | M.S. MEAM, 2025 | 2025 | Robotics Software Engineer at Intrinsic (Google) |
| Harshil Parekh | M.S. Robotics, 2023 | 2022–2024 | Robotics Software Engineer at BotBuilt |
Visiting Scholars
| Name | Affiliation | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ze Zhang | Automation, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) | Fall 2024 | Ph.D. Candidate; Visiting Research Scholar (advised by Knut Ă…kesson) |
| Enrico Martini | Computer Science, University of Verona (Italy) | Spring 2024 | Ph.D. Candidate; Visiting Research Scholar (advised by Nicola Bombieri) |
Master’s Thesis
| Name | Degree | Years | Thesis / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paul [Sanghyub] Lee | M.S. Robotics, 2025 | 2023–2025 | “Towards Real-Time Muscle Health Monitoring and Muscle-in-the-Loop Robotic Assistants via AI-Driven Wearable Ultrasound Processing”; now Ph.D. candidate in MEAM (Penn) |
| George [Jiayuan] Gao | M.S. Robotics, 2025 | 2024–2025 | “Visuomotor Object-Centric Out-Of-Distribution Recovery Policy”; Outstanding Master’s Researcher Award in Robotics |
| Ho Jin Choi | M.S. MEAM, 2024 | 2022–2024 | “Gaussian Process-Based Active Exploration Strategies in Vision and Touch”; Outstanding Master’s Researcher Award in MEAM; Summer 2024 intern at MERL; now Ph.D. candidate in MEAM (Penn) |
| Zhiquan Zhang | M.S. ESE, 2024 | 2022–2024 | “Real-Time Safety-Critical Passive Torque Control with Analytic and Learning-based Constraints”; Best Master’s Thesis in ESE; now Ph.D. candidate at UIUC |
| Haihui Gao | M.S. ESE & MEAM, 2024 | 2022–2024 | “Advancing Dynamical Systems in Learning from Demonstration: A Novel Approach for Modeling Self-Crossing Trajectories”; now Ph.D. candidate at University of Montreal |
| Satyajeet Das | M.S. ESE, 2024 | 2023–2024 | “Towards Vision-based Safety: A Real-Time Approach for Generating Barrier Functions using Depth Sensors”; now Ph.D. candidate at USC (started Fall 2024) |
| Haoming Li | M.S. ESE, 2024 | 2023–2024 | “Towards Robust SLAM with Neural Implicit Representations”; Research Engineer at the University of Pennsylvania |