I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where I lead the RobIn (Robot Interactive Intelligence) Lab, and an Amazon Scholar. My research bridges robotics, computer vision, and machine learning to build robots that can act safely and autonomously in everyday environments—and continue learning as their tasks and surroundings change.

I’m fascinated by how perception and action work together: how we learn about the world by interacting with it, and use that understanding to change our surroundings. This motivates my research on robots that acquire skills from human demonstrations and corrections, improve through physical interaction, and retain and reuse experience over time. I study how to represent actions for effective learning, which experiences help robots improve, and how memory can support adaptation and longer tasks. My work combines reinforcement and imitation learning with perception, planning, and control, with applications in mobile and whole-body manipulation, dexterous and contact-rich interaction, and everyday tasks in homes and offices.

Before joining UT Austin, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford with Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese and an AI Researcher at Salesforce AI. I earned my Ph.D. from Technische Universität Berlin under Oliver Brock and my B.Sc. from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

My honors include the NSF CAREER Award, the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award, the TRI Young Faculty Researcher Award, and the Amazon Faculty Award. My work has also received the RSS Best Systems Paper Award, ICRA Best Paper Award, IROS Best Mechanism Award, and RLC Outstanding Paper Award. I serve as Co-Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Mobile Manipulation, contribute to editorial and program committees across robotics and machine learning, and am a co-founder of QueerInRobotics.

Prospective students and applicants: due to the large number of requests, I may be unable to reply to your email. If you want to apply with my group, take a look here.