I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. I direct the EmPRISE Lab. Previously, I was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I worked with Dr. Sidd Srinivasa at the Personal Robotics Lab on food manipulation in the context of assistive feeding tasks. I did my Ph. D in Robotics at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) at Georgia Tech where I worked with Dr. Charlie Kemp at the Healthcare Robotics Lab. My Ph.D dissertation was on rapid haptic perception using force and thermal sensing. 

I want to enable robots to assist people with mobility limitations with tasks for daily living. These tasks, which are very different from one another, require physical and social interactions between robots and their immediate surroundings in unstructured and/or cluttered human environments. The fundamental research question that I am interested in is how to leverage robot-world physical and social interactions in unstructured human environments to intelligently and efficiently perform relevant activities of daily living. This spans research in the fields of Human-Robot Interaction, Haptic Perception, and Robot Manipulation. I am not only passionate about developing algorithms that solve fundamental problems in these domains but also strongly believe in developing real robotic systems, deploying them in the real world, and evaluating them with real users.

I only actively update my CV on this website. For any other recent updates (news etc.), please follow my lab website.

Bio for Talks:
Tapomayukh "Tapo" Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he directs the EmPRISE Lab (https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/). He completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology and was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He wants to enable robots to assist people with mobility limitations with activities of daily living. His work spans the fields of human-robot interaction, haptic perception, and robot manipulation and focuses on addressing the fundamental research question on how to leverage robot-world physical interactions in unstructured human environments to perform relevant activities of daily living. He is the recipient of TRI Young Faculty Researcher Award'24, NSF CAREER Award'23, AFCEA 40 under 40 Award'22, and his work has won Best Paper Award at RSS'25, Best Paper and Student Paper Award Finalist and Best HRI Paper Award Finalist at ICRA’25, Best Systems Paper Award Finalist at HRI'24, Best Demo Award at HRI'24, Best RoboCup Paper Award at IROS’22, Best Paper Award Finalist and ABB Best Student Paper Award Finalist at IROS’22, Best Technical Advances Paper Award at HRI'19, and Best Demonstration Award at NeurIPS’18. His work has also been featured in many media outlets including the BBC, Reuters, New York Times, IEEE Spectrum, and GeekWire and his robot-assisted feeding work was selected to be one of the best interactive designs of 2019 by Fast Company.