People

Andres Arias-Londono

Mr. Arias earned a Bachelor, master's and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira (Colombia), in 2010, 2012 and 2018 respectively. He’s currently pursuing a PhD in Aerospace Engineering at Mississippi State University. His areas of research involve optimization algorithms for applications in control of aerial robotics.    

Email: aa2935@msstate.edu 

Mahsa Soroori Khosroshahi

Mahsa is currently a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering. 

Email: msoroori@villanova.edu  

Xiangqi "Wilson" Wan

Wilson is currently a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering. Previously, he earned his M.S. in Vehicle Engineering. His research interests are Reinforcement Learning, Model Predictive Control (MPC), and Dynamic Programming. He is proficient in Python, PyTorch, ROS/ROS 2, and Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab. Outside of work, he likes basketball and tennis.

Email: wwan@villanova.edu  

Mingsheng Zheng

Mingsheng Zheng is a first-year Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University. His research interests focus on LLM-controlled robotic systems, particularly integrating large language models with multi-agent system reasoning, decision-making, and reinforcement learning. He has prior research experience in vision-language-action models, multimodal learning, and computer vision, including work on robotic policy adaptation and cross-modal representation learning. His technical background includes large language models, vision-language models, reinforcement learning, and deep learning. He is currently interested in developing intelligent and smarter multi-agent systems that leverage LLMs for high-level planning and interaction.

Email: mzheng@villanova.edu 

Hairui Yin

Hairui Yin is a Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at Villanova University, joining in Fall 2026. His research background is in generative modeling, causal learning, and counterfactual reasoning, with experience in causal image editing and flow-based generative models. His current research interests focus on combining causal generative AI, active exploration, and reinforcement learning to enable robots to better understand, adapt to, and continuously learn about the physical world through interaction. He also has experience with robotic and physical simulation environments, including MuJoCo and Isaac Gym, as well as 3D simulation and rendering tools such as Blender and Unreal Engine 5.

Email: hyin02@villanova.edu  

Ruihao Zhang

I am a first-year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University. I received my bachelor's degree in computer science ​from Macau University of Science and Technology. My current research focuses on robotics, particularly robot learning, manipulation, VLAs and reinforcement learning. 

Email: rzhang04@villanova.edu 

Joshua Pollack

Joshua Pollack ’27 is pursuing an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering following his completion of a B.S. in Chemical Engineering. He was born and raised in Salisbury, MD, where he was brought up learning core engineering principles from birth. He is extremely passionate about travel, fitness, and innovation. After his time at Villanova, he hopes to pursue a career in the Space and Defense industry with the dream of leading the world in cutting-edge science and technology.

Email: jpolla07@villanova.edu  

• Noah Pletcher

• Luke VanEmburgh

• Bradley Berde

• Ryan Neu

• Paulo Piedade 

• Constance Huber