About

I’m a robotics PhD candidate in my fifth year at Carnegie Mellon University. My research is generally related to autonomous navigation for planetary rovers, especially perception and mapping as they pertain to navigation. I am interested in topics ranging from neural rendering techniques to active perception, to the extent that they can be applied to planetary exploration. My thesis research is on integrating physical process models into large-scale mapping for robotic scientific exploration, which I believe will enable improved target selection for maximizing scientific information gain. I was a recipient of the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity (NSTGRO) fellowship for my research for the first four years of my degree.

I took a somewhat unconventional path to robotics. After graduating from Georgetown University with a BA in Mathematics, I worked at Berkeley Research Group, an economic consulting firm, prior to returning to school. This experience gave me the opportunity to discover what I liked in a job, what I would change, and drove me to think hard about my professional and personal goals. I decided to pursue field robotics with a focus on planetary rovers to gain hands-on experience with field experiments, continue my applied statistics and software education, and contribute to planetary exploration. I’d like to encourage others to pursue robotics as well, so I volunteer with Girls of Steel, an all-women and gender minority FIRST robotics team affiliated with Carnegie Mellon.