About

I’m a robotics engineer with KBR, Inc. working at NASA Ames Research Center. I recently graduated with my PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where my thesis was on physical process-informed mapping for mobile exploration robots, such as planetary rovers. My work focuses on 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. In graduate school, I was a recipient of the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity (NSTGRO) fellowship for 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 during graduate school I volunteered with Girls of Steel, an all-women and gender minority FIRST robotics team affiliated with Carnegie Mellon.