I am a roboticist conducting developmental robotics and artificial life research. At Columbia University, I earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering under Professor Hod Lipson at the Creative Machines Lab. I worked as a postdoctoral scholar for Professor Nathan Kutz at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Currently, I research agentic AI systems at Distyl AI.
I’ve designed, built, programmed, and simulated modular and particle robots. My research focuses on robots that can grow and self-improve by integrating materials found or taken from other robots. Further, I study modular and particle robots that can operate without central control. My findings are recorded in my Ph.D. thesis on Metabolic Machines and were presented at ReMar 2024.
Previously, I developed an autonomous hunting drone that can operate in GPS-deprived environments, built a data collection platform for our phenotyping and disease detection project, and used neural networks to mimic visual design intuition. I mentored graduate and undergraduate students in my research and have experience teaching Digital Manufacturing and Evolutionary Computation.
I am passionate about researching robots that imitate or transcend their biological counterparts, building machines that self-assemble and self-improve, and using my knowledge of AI, digital manufacturing, and robotics to connect machine intelligence and the real world.