About me

I am a Research Assistant Professor at the Neuromuscular Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory (NREL), NC State. My research applies reinforcement learning and inverse reinforcement learning to wearable and rehabilitation robotics, letting exoskeletons and robotic prostheses learn individualized assistance policies directly from how a person moves instead of from hand tuned rules. Recent work includes a mediolateral hip exoskeleton that proactively adjusts step width to improve balance during walking, and a bilevel optimization framework for co-adapting robotic knee prostheses with their users, published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

I am also cofounder of Avex Motion, where we build AI powered wearable exoskeletons for physical therapy clinics. The system gives therapists objective, data driven metrics on patient progress and automates documentation, addressing the cost pressure, reimbursement squeeze, and patient dropout clinics face while treating the roughly 50 million Americans who suffer musculoskeletal injuries each year.

I earned my PhD at Arizona State University under Dr. Hyunglae Lee, developing robotic methods to quantify and treat neuromuscular deficits in stroke and multiple sclerosis patients. Before that, I built embedded systems and controls for surgical robots at the Biorobotics Lab, NUS, and fall detection systems for elderly patients in Singapore. I hold a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras, where I led the university’s robotics teams at Robocon (2011) and FIRA (2012-13).

Across 15 years in robotics, spanning mobile robots, multi-agent systems, industrial automation, surgical robotics, and rehabilitation engineering, I’ve authored over 20 publications and hold multiple patents. I move comfortably from actuator design to control theory to the learning algorithms that run on top of them.

I’m looking to grow Avex Motion and expand NREL’s research through new funding, university partnerships, and collaborators focused on getting adaptive, human aware robotics out of the lab and into people’s lives.