Welcome
I am an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, with a courtesy appointment in the Robotics Institute.
My research focuses on making autonomous robots more capable and trustworthy by exploiting recent advances in optimization and artificial intelligence. In particular, I am interested in adopting tools from global optimization to improve sample efficiency of policy learning, to enable the discovery of reliable solutions even in the face of uncertain or unknown models, and to provide optimality guarantees for difficult non-convex optimization problems.
Previously, I was a researcher in the Willow group at Inria Paris (until December 2025) and a postdoc at the University of Toronto working with Timothy D. Barfoot (until February 2024). I received my Ph.D. from EPFL (LCAV), advised by Martin Vetterli and Adam Scholefield, where I worked on non-visual spatial perception.
Links: Google Scholar · LinkedIn
Working with me
Undergraduate / Master’s students
If you’re excited about optimization for robotics, I’m happy to hear from you about research projects in January 2026 or September 2026.
Please email me with:
- CV
- a short research statement (½–1 page)
CMU undergraduate students can also browse the following page:
Undergraduate Experience Projects (CMU internal)
Postdocs
I’m always open to interviewing strong candidates. In particular, if you would like to apply with the CBI Fellowship (deadline January 31, 2026), please get in touch.
Latest news
Last update: January 8, 2026.
December 2025 I had a blast visiting the LS2N centre in Nantes. Thank you to Clément Moreau for the invitation!
October 2025 Super happy to visit Toulouse one last time before leaving for the US, this time with my student Louis. It was great to see both the POP and Gepetto teams. Thank you to Didier Henrion, Nicolas Mansard, and Ege Gürsoy for the warm welcome!
September 2025 Presented at the Journée Nationale de la Recherche Robotique in Rennes. It was great to connect with the French robotics community. Thank you to Justin Carpentier for the invitation!
June 2025 I was faculty chair for this year’s RSS Pioneers workshop in Los Angeles. After RSS, I was honored to present our latest research at the CCDC at UC Santa Barbara. Thank you Tobia Marcucci for having me!
May 2025 Visited Georgia Tech after ICRA 2025 in Atlanta and gave a talk at the Lunar Lab. Thanks to Lu Gan for the invitation.
March 2025 Presented recent work at the MIT JTL Urban Mobility Lab online seminar series.
February 2025 Nice success for Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowships in our centre. The Inria Paris centre secured three projects for Ajay Sathya (Willow), Frederik Kunstner (Sierra), and myself (Willow).
November 2024 We organized the workshop on Differentiable Optimization Everywhere at CoRL 2024 in Munich. Amazing speakers, a packed room throughout the day, and a very fun social event. Recordings are available online.
November 2024 It was a pleasure to collaborate with the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich on a summary paper on continuous-time state estimation methods, currently under review. Please get in touch if you have comments!
July 2024 We organized the first workshop on the Frontiers of Optimization for Robotics at RSS 2024, with a great lineup of speakers and participants. Recordings are available online.
June 2024 We released a summary paper on certifiably optimal estimation. It is intended as an entry point to the topic and an overview of our recent work.
May 2024 Very grateful that I was in this year’s cohort of RSS Pioneers!
March 2024 - April 2024 I had the opportunity to visit the lab of Nicolas Boumal, EPFL, and Sylvain Calinon, IDIAP, Switzerland, giving talks about our work at both institutes, and getting to know a lot of cool new research! Thank you for hosting me!
November 2023 Had the pleasure to be presenting our latest research at MIT, Harvard and Northeastern University during my tour of the vibrant Boston. The recording from my talk at MIT is available here and the slides are available here. Thank you to everyone for hosting me!