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.