About Me

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and the Technical University of Munich, working at the Learning Systems and Robotics Lab supervised by Prof. Angela Schoellig.

My research develops methods that make learning-based robots safer in the real world by bridging control-theoretic guarantees with practical implementations. I advance control barrier function (CBF) and model predictive control (MPC) safety filters, particularly under input constraints, in discrete-time implementations, and in closed-loop with reinforcement learning. More recently, I have combined semantic knowledge from foundation models and open-vocabulary perception with safety filters to enforce common-sense safety constraints beyond collision avoidance for manipulation. My long-term goal is to enable robots to operate safely in dynamic, unstructured environments by unifying semantic understanding with provable safety guarantees. I aim to move towards safety specifications that emerge from perception and reasoning, rather than relying on hand-specified constraints.

Before joining the Learning Systems and Robotics Lab I spent time at Prof. Francesco Borrelli’s MPC Lab at UC Berkeley and Prof. Ludovic Righetti’s Movement Generation and Control Group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. I also worked on vehicle dynamics and control at Prof. Raquel Urtasun’s autonomous driving startup Waabi, and previously at the Volkswagen Group Research Department in Wolfsburg and Silicon Valley. I received my master’s degree from Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) in Mechatronics.