Bio
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, where I lead the TEA Lab. In my research, I aim to create intelligent robots and AI systems that are capable of seamlessly integrating with human environments and tasks. To this end, I develop neuro-symbolic methods that reason over the attributes and affordances of objects in the environment, allowing them to learn behaviors efficiently and adapt to new environments. My work spans robot learning, robot manipulation, human-robot interaction, and language- and vision-conditioned policies for robots that learn continually over their lifetime. I earned my Ph.D. from Arizona State University under Prof. Heni Ben Amor in the Interactive Robotics Lab, where I specialized in physical human-robot interaction. I’ve also collaborated on projects with Bosch, Intel AI Labs, and X, The Moonshot Factory.