I am a post-doc at UC Berkeley's EECS Department working with Prof. Ken Goldberg and Prof. Pieter Abbeel. I recently graduated from the Ph.D. program at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where my advisors were Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa and Prof. James Kuffner. While at CMU, I worked on the Personal Robotics project, which is a collaboration between Intel, CMU, and the Quality of Life Technology Center that focuses on creating a mobile manipulator for use in the home. I have also mentored several students from Prof. Tamim Asfour's lab at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and completed internships at the Digital Human Research Center in Japan, where I worked with Dr. Satoshi Kagami on grasping and motion planning algorithms. I also completed an internship at LAAS-CNRS in France with Dr. Thierry Simeon, where I focused on planning in high-dimensional cost spaces. I received the Intel PhD Fellowship in 2009.

I have a broad range of experience in robotics; including design, integration, control, sensing, and planning for multi-legged robots, helicopters, mobile manipulators, humanoids, and surgical robots. My research focuses on creating general-purpose manipulation planning algorithms and applying these algorithms to problems in the domestic and surgical domains. I am interested in all aspects of algorithm development; including creating efficient algorithms, proving their theoretical properties, validating them on real-world robots and problems, integrating them with sensing and higher-level reasoning, and distributing them to open-source communities. I draw on ideas in search, optimization, control theory, and topology to develop my planning algorithms and to prove their properties. I also strive to develop algorithms for practical manipulation tasks which can generalize to many types of tasks and application areas.