Education
PhD Candidate, Electrical Engineering
Fall 2020 - Spring 2026
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
GPA: 4.09/4.30
BS, Electrical Engineering, Summa Cum Laude
September 2016 - June 2020
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA
GPA: 3.92/4.00
Honors and Awards
- Participant, ICRA 2025 PhD Consortium, May 2025
- McMullen Fellowship, Fall 2025
- Lester Eastman Fellowship, Fall 2023
- Cornell ECE Outstanding TA Award, 2021-2022
Research Experience
PhD Research — Napp Lab at Cornell University
Fall 2020 - Present
- “Improved Bag-of-Words Image Retrieval with Geometric Constraints for Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA 2025
- Proposed an improved Bag-of-Words (BoW) image retrieval system for higher precision and recall for ground texture localization
- Utilized better BoW vocabularies and exploited ground texture localization problem constraints to improve the mean average precision from 0.026 to 0.559 for global localization
- Able to identify almost 3x as many loop closures for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) applications
- “Frozen Assets: Leveraging Ice, Water, and Phase Transitions in Robots”, IROS 2024
- Demonstrated the utility of leveraging ice and water phase transitions to augment the capabilities of diverse robotic systems, including rovers, modular robots, and soft robots
- Engineered multiple robotic platforms that exploit melting, fracturing, and freezing for in-situ reconfiguration, actuation, and environmental adaptation
- Performed a scaling analysis to formalize the feasible operational envelopes for ice-based structural elements, considering both mechanical stress and thermal melting constraints
- “Lightweight Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA 2024
- Developed an algorithm to localize a mobile robot using images of the ground texture
- Used image feature matching and spatial filtering to achieve submillimeter localization precision on areas covering more than $100~m^{2}$
- High accuracy version improved state-of-the-art, lightweight version halved execution time, enabling localization frequencies of ~4Hz on a Raspberry Pi 4
- Applications include warehouse robots, autonomous driving, and underwater vehicles
- Current Work
- Developing deep learning feature detector tailored to ground texture by leveraging rotation-equivariant convolutional filters
- Prototyping robot capable of micrometer-level localization using inexpensive hardware
Artificial Intelligence/Computer Vision Intern — EpiSys Science Inc.
Fall 2019 - 2020
- Proposed a novel reinforcement learning algorithm for an agent to exploit partial environment information while learning POMDP environments
- Decreased sPOMDP model generation times by 31-63% while improving robustness
Research Assistant — Interconnected and Integrated Bioelectronics Lab, UCLA
Fall 2016 - Spring 2020
- Designed and manufactured a skin health monitor and a bladder monitor
- Collaborated on a device that uses photoplethysmography (PPG) to detect blood clots after surgery
- Engineered a device that non-invasively extracts sweat to determine blood glucose levels for diabetics
Capstone Project — UCLA ECE 183DB Design of Robotic Systems
Spring 2019
- Worked as a team to build a multi-robot system that used RFID tags for spatial communication
- Observed a 3x mapping speed increase for robots using the spatial communication method vs without
Publications
- “Improved Bag-of-Words Image Retrieval with Geometric Constraints for Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA (2025)
- “Frozen Assets: Leveraging Ice, Water, and Phase Transitions in Robots”, IROS (2024)
- “Lightweight Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA (2024)
- “Inexpensive, Automated Pruning Weight Estimation in Vineyards”, ICRA (2024)
- Textbook chapter: “Wearable Chemical Sensors” in Wearable Bioelectronics (2020)
- Best Research Poster: UCLA Electrical Engineering Annual Research Review (2019)
- “Emerging wearable technologies for personalized health and performance monitoring”, SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing Conference (2018)
- Best Undergraduate Research Poster: UCLA Electrical Engineering Annual Research Review (2018)
View all publications
Teaching Experience
Teaching Assistant - ECE 3140 Embedded Systems
Spring Semesters 2021-2024
- Led a team of teaching assistants in the delivery of weekly discussion sections for a lower-level undergraduate embedded systems course
- Developed novel course content, including live hardware demonstrations, to provide students with hands-on learning experiences
- Achieved consistently high ratings on mid-semester and end-of-semester student evaluations
Outreach and Service
- Volunteer Firefighter at Cayuga Heights Fire Department, Spring 2022 – Fall 2023
- “Write A Researcher” Mentor, Fall 2021 – Summer 2023
Skills
- Localization, Mapping, SLAM, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI, ROS, Python, C++, C
Download Full CV (PDF)