I am the Asness Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) Department at the University of Pennsylvania. I hold a secondary appointment in the Computer and Information Science (CIS) Department, am a member of the graduate group for the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department and am primary faculty in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) lab. I lead the Autonomous Manipulation @ Penn (AMP) Lab.

My research focuses on enabling robots to robustly perform long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks in everyday environments. I envision a world in which robots are cooking dinner at home, packing supplies in hospitals and cleaning up messy classrooms. Completing these types of tasks requires a robot to execute long sequences of actions, where each action involves many connected, discrete and continuous choices that are critically impacted by physical constraints. Furthermore, for robots to operate in the real world, it is critical that they be able to cope with partial or uncertain information. To solves these types of tasks, my research proposes models and algorithms that exploit the physics and geometry of the world in order to tackle the dual challenges of long-horizon decision-making and acting under uncertainty. I contribute models based on engineering mechanics and learned from data and I build on tools from motion planning, control and task planning.

Previously, I completed a Ph.D. (2024) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, advised by Tomás Lozano-Pérez and Alberto Rodriguez. At MIT I was a member of the LIS Group and the MCube Lab. Prior to MIT, I received a B.S. (2017) in Computer Science and Robotics from CMU. My academic lineage is more of a "family graph" than a "family tree".