Professional Experience

Graduate Student Researcher | Aug. 2019 - Present (4.5 years)

MSC Lab

• Conducted 5-year research project in collaboration with Sony AI to advance learning-based control algorithms for autonomous racing in the challenging, high-fidelity simulator Gran Turismo Sport
• Implemented and improved many cutting edge, popular ML and RL algorithms by leveraging my deep understanding of their mathematical derivation and theoretical basis for algorithmic choices
• Tackled learning from human demonstrations by leveraging RL with generative adversarial networks and proposed a new imitation-based decision transformer with corrective online rollouts
• Derived a novel hierarchical RL algorithm with learned skills that shows significant improvement over existing methods in long-horizon robotic manipulation (Fetch), maze (D4RL), and racing (Gran Turismo) tasks
• Effectively communicated in regular research presentations and seminars for various audiences and exhibited high-quality technical writing and edit ing of applications and scientific papers
• Showed leadership and long-term vision when mentoring 4 graduate students visiting from other universities that resulted in multiple publications and continuous improvement of a unified control system

Research Scientist Intern | May - Dec. 2021 (7 months)

Sony AI

• Proposed a novel motion primitive formulation for online racing trajectory planning, resulting in ongoing collaboration with top robotics researchers and paper submission to competitive controls conference
• After inspecting company’s existing racing MPC implementation, suggested and executed algorithmic improvements that increased tracking performance and decreased lap-time by 4 seconds
• Merged multiple branches with new features to a Github repository with 30+ contributors and wrote code that adhered to unit testing, typing, and style requirements to pass peer and manager code reviews

Engineering Co-op | May 2015 - Dec. 2017 (18 months)

Zimmer Biomet

Development Engineering Co-op | August – December 2017

• Led design verification for small-scale pilot project, and presented department’s verification reports to Quality and Regulatory departments Researched ASTM and ISO standards, previous company testing, and literature to determine appropriate design inputs and verification methods
• Skills: Technical reports, mechanical failure analysis, CAD, intermediate GD&T course

Engineering Co-op | August – December 2016

• Determined process time requirements and troubleshooted an electronic form to allow non-standard address lines and automatic drop downs
• Skills: Excel VBA, data validation formulas, standard formulas, pivot tables; CAD (NX)

Manufacturing Engineering Co-op | May – August 2015, January – May 2016

• Statistically characterized process capability with historical measurements and composed re-work steps for non-conforming products
• Skills: Minitab, process capability, design of experiments, introductory GD&T course