I'm an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University and part of the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL). Before that, I was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University at Buffalo. My research is the intersection of algorithm and robot design. I especially enjoy projects that focus on how to map mathematical insights to physical systems to allow them to perform new tasks and behaviors. I'm a 2019 NSF CAREER award recipient and a finalist and occasional winner of several best paper awards: RSS10, DARS12, DARS18, RSS18.

My research group often draws inspiration from biology. Many organisms operate in random, unstructured, and fluctuating environments and often do so with a baffling lack of global information, planning, and communication. Their approaches seem to focus on self-organization, managing noise created by many interacting components, and using distributed reactive behaviors as feedback to adapt their strategies. As a result, we often collaborate with biologists to help figure out what animals might be up to and then apply our findings to robotic systems.