Curriculum Vitae

Academic and professional experience

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Research Profile

Robotics Ph.D. candidate specializing in geometry-aware visual localization and SLAM for mobile robots. Develops lightweight algorithms and integrated robotic systems, with experience spanning geometric computer vision, machine learning, hardware development, and real-world experimental validation.

Education

PhD Candidate, Electrical Engineering

Fall 2020 - Spring/Summer 2027 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY GPA: 4.09/4.30

MS, Electrical Engineering

December 2023 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

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

  • Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Semi-Finalist, Australia, 2026
  • Participant, ICRA 2025 PhD Consortium, May 2025
  • McMullen Fellowship, Fall 2025
  • Lester Eastman Fellowship, Fall 2023
  • Cornell ECE Outstanding TA Award, 2021-2022
  • Best Research Poster, UCLA Electrical Engineering Annual Research Review, 2019
  • Best Undergraduate Research Poster, UCLA Electrical Engineering Annual Research Review, 2018

Research Experience

PhD Research — Napp Lab at Cornell University

Fall 2020 - Present

  • “Deterministic GAN-Based Ground Texture Simulator for SLAM”, Ongoing Research
    • Creating a controllable simulator that generates spatially consistent ground-texture imagery for localization and SLAM research
  • “Micro-Localization: High-Precision Mobile Robot Localization Using Microscopic Ground Texture”, Submitted to ICRA 2027
    • Built a low-cost, markerless localization system that uses microscopic surface texture to achieve global localization accuracy in the tens of micrometers
    • Designed a custom mobile robot and high-magnification sensing module costing under $600, adapting the localization pipeline to a scaled-orthographic camera model
    • Validated localization accuracy against a precision CNC gantry across multiple surface types and demonstrated reuse of the same map across gantry and mobile-robot platforms
    • Measured thermal expansion of an aluminum rod using the localization system and demonstrated agreement with temperature-based predictions
  • “HyGround: A Hybrid Loop Closure Architecture for Scalable Ground Texture SLAM”, Manuscript in Preparation
    • Designed a scalable ground-texture SLAM system that outperformed both ground-texture SLAM baselines on most trajectories while reducing per-keyframe memory by up to 55x relative to a direct-method baseline
  • “Improved Bag-of-Words Image Retrieval with Geometric Constraints for Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA 2025
    • Created a geometry-aware Bag-of-Words retrieval system for ground texture global localization and loop-closure detection
    • Exploited the fixed scale and consistent orientation of downward-facing imagery through scale-binned vocabularies and integrated geometric verification
    • Improved retrieval mean average precision from 0.026 to 0.559 and detected nearly 3x as many loop closures as a standard DBoW baseline
  • “Lightweight Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA 2024
    • Built a lightweight global-localization system using natural ground texture for deployment on resource-constrained robots
    • Introduced improved feature selection, locality-preserving dimensionality reduction, and KD-tree spatial voting
    • The high-accuracy version improved state-of-the-art localization performance, while the lightweight version roughly halved runtime and achieved over 4 Hz on a Raspberry Pi 4
  • “Inexpensive, Automated Pruning Weight Estimation in Vineyards”, ICRA 2024
    • Contributed to a low-cost smartphone and structured-light vision system for automated grapevine pruning-weight estimation
    • Achieved R² = 0.80 on vertical-shoot-positioned vines and demonstrated initial results on high-cordon vines
  • “Frozen Assets: Leveraging Ice, Water, and Phase Transitions in Robots”, IROS 2024
    • Co-developed robotic systems that exploit melting, freezing, and fracturing of ice for structural reconfiguration, actuation, and environmental adaptation, supported by a scaling analysis of ice structural elements

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

Manuscripts Under Review

  • “Micro-Localization: High-Precision Mobile Robot Localization Using Microscopic Ground Texture”, submitted to ICRA (2027)

Manuscripts in Preparation

  • “HyGround: A Hybrid Loop Closure Architecture for Scalable Ground Texture SLAM”

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • “Improved Bag-of-Words Image Retrieval with Geometric Constraints for Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA (2025)
  • “Lightweight Ground Texture Localization”, ICRA (2024)
  • “Frozen Assets: Leveraging Ice, Water, and Phase Transitions in Robots”, IROS (2024)
  • “Inexpensive, Automated Pruning Weight Estimation in Vineyards”, ICRA (2024)
  • “Emerging wearable technologies for personalized health and performance monitoring”, SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing Conference (2018)

Book Chapters

  • Textbook chapter: “Wearable Chemical Sensors” in Wearable Bioelectronics (2020)

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

  • Peer Reviewer: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L); IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA); IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
  • Volunteer Firefighter at Cayuga Heights Fire Department, Spring 2022 – Fall 2023
  • “Write A Researcher” Mentor, Fall 2021 – Summer 2023

Skills

  • Localization, Mapping, SLAM, Visual Place Recognition, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI, ROS, Python, C++, C, Linux, Git

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