I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Dr. Matthew Golub. I'm also a NIH T32 in Theoretical and Computational Approaches to Neural Circuits of Cognition Program Fellow through the University of Washington Computational Neuroscience Center. Prior to my postdoctoral studies, I did my Ph.D. in robotics and machine learning with Dr. Byron Boots, drawing from deep learning, optimal control, and reinforcement learning. Prior to transferring to the University of Washington, I was a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, from which I received my M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. And before that, I received by B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

When not doing research, I spend my time playing guitar, composing music, and playing the same old RPG games over and over again.

Research Interests

I'm broadly interested in understanding how learning shapes neural population activity in the context of motor control and decision making. My current research uses a combination of task-optimized and data-driven recurrent neural networks to investigate differences in how neural population activity reorganizes under rapid motor adaptation versus multi-day learning. Much of my work draws on tools in deep learning, optimal control, reinforcement learning, graphical models, and computational neuroscience. On the robotics side, my PhD work focused on integrating learned components within the framework of model predictive control (MPC) to improve controller performance and reduce computational requirements.

News

[03/2024] Officially began my position as a NIH T32 in Theoretical and Computational Approaches to Neural Circuits of Cognition Program Fellow through the University of Washington Computational Neuroscience Center!

[01/2024] Started my postdoctoral researcher position at UW CSE with Dr. Matthew Golub!

[10/2023] Successfully passed my Final Exam (the PhD defense at UW CSE)!

[03/2023] Successfully passed my Generals Exam (the PhD proposal process at UW CSE)!

[12/2022] Presented our paper on Learning Sampling Distributions for Model Predictive Control at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Auckland, New Zealand! [Paper Link]

[05/2022] Presented our paper on Learning to Optimize in Model Predictive Control at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Philly! [Paper Link]

[01/2022] Followed my advisor and transferred to the University of Washington.

[06/2019] Presented our paper on An Online Learning Approach to Model Predictive Control at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in Freiberg, Germany! [Paper Link]

[12/2018] Presented our paper on Differentiable MPC for End-to-End Planning and Control at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference in Montreal! [Paper Link]