Hojoon Son

I am currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), supervised by Dr. Fan Zhang. I received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering and electrical and electronic engineering, and the M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, I gained professional experience as a Software Engineer with NEXTLab Company Ltd., from 2020 to 2023. During my Ph.D. program, I interned at Volvo Group as a packaging engineer in Summer 2024, where I focused on developing an AI/ML-based packaging decision-making pipeline in Azure cloud. I also worked at the Isuzu Technical Center of America (ITCA) as an autonomous driving intern in Fall 2026.

My research interests include Robotics, specifically Physical AI, VLA, Multimodal Perception, Safety-aware Planning, and Physics-informed Machine Learning.