Ekta Samani
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Chris Atkeson.
Earlier, I was a Postdoctoral Scientist at Amazon Robotics. I earned my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington (UW), advised by Prof. Ashis Banerjee. Before joining the Ph.D. program, I was an Operations Officer at Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd. in Mangalore, India. I obtained my B.Tech in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar.
The central goal of my research is to achieve human-like performance in autonomous systems by combining model-based reasoning with advanced pattern recognition.
News
Jan 2025: Joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.
Jun 2024: I won the UW Graduate School's 2024 Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Mathematics, Physical Sciences & Engineering category. [Details]
Jan 2024: I started serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Aug 2023: Joined Amazon as a Postdoctoral Scientist under the Postdoctoral Science Program
Aug 2023: Successfully completed my Ph.D. [Dissertation]
Jul 2023: UW Mechanical Engineering featured a story about my research on the department website. Check another related story here.
May 2023: I received Women Engineers (WE) Rise Outstanding Student Award (Mechanical Engineering)
Apr 2023: I have been selected as an RSS Pioneer (2023).
Mar 2023: I won second place prize in the UW Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition
