About

I am a PhD student studying robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, USA. I work as a graduate research assistant in the Autonomous Control and Decision Systems Laboratory with Professor Evangelos Theodorou. My research at Georgia Tech focuses on stochastic optimal control and reinforcement learning problems. This research spans the entire range from theory to implementation. On the theoretical side my research focuses on connections between classical notions of optimality in stochastic systems and inequality relationships between information theoretic quantities obtained via probability and measure theory. In terms of computational methods I focus on Monte-Carlo methods for online optimization, and efficient machine learning algorithms, such as neural networks and gaussian processes, for identifying system dynamics from data. The key tool that I use to implement these methods on real robots is massive parallel computing with GPUs.

Prior to coming to Atlanta for my PhD, I obtained a Bachelor’s of Science in mathematics from the University of Washington in my hometown of Seattle. In my senior year I worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Daniel Lab with Dr. Eric Rombokas and Professor Tom Daniel on quadrotor navigation, and before that I worked as an undergraduate researcher with Dr. Chris Swierczewski and Professor Bernard Deconinck working on computational methods for solving partial differential equations.

In my free time I enjoy baseball, football, reading/watching history and sci-fi, breweries, and getting outdoors and hiking.