Electrical and Systems Engineering

NSF GRFP and NDSEG Recipients

Welcome to the ESE Department’s NSF GRFP and NDSEG recipient page for doctoral students.

If you would like to view the applications and research statements from SEAS fellowship recipients, please contact the department’s PhD program coordinator, Nicole Contosta at contosta@seas.upenn.edu

Vatsal Bandaru

Vatsal Bandaru

1st year doctoral student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. Anthony Sigillito

Vatsal’s research centers on scaling and controlling silicon spin-based quantum processors, a burgeoning platform for quantum computing. He aims to develop novel techniques for long-range spin entanglement that overcome key challenges in scaling devices to larger numbers of qubits. Ultimately, he hopes to enable robust architectures and multi-qubit gate operations suitable for utility-scale quantum computing.

LinkedIn  |  Google Scholar  |  Penn Quantum Hardware Lab

Samarth Chopra

1st year Doctoral Student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. Vijay Kumar.

Samarth’s research centers on perception and learning-based control for general-purpose robots across diverse environments and embodiments. He aims to develop scalable real-to-sim-to-real methods that transform real-world observations into physically grounded simulations for reliable robot policy learning and evaluation. Ultimately, he hopes to enable robots to generalize across tasks, environments, and embodiments.

LinkedIn 

Vijay Kumar Lab

Kyle Horton

2nd year PhD student advised by Dr. Nikolai Matni and Dr. George Pappas.

Kyle’s work proposed for the fellowship focuses on the trade-offs between exploration and exploitation in data-driven controllers with online data collection. Oftentimes, the true dynamics of systems of interest, aircraft or robotic manipulators for example, are not known due to the complex physics at play. Thus, many methods have been developed for using collected system data to control the system without needing knowledge of the dynamics. Consider then the example of an airplane: when collecting data to use for a data-driven controller, it would be preferable if you did not crash the airplane in the process, but by not allowing certain risky actions to be taken, data is not able to be gathered about the effect of these particular actions. So the question to answer is then, how much efficacy of the controller is lost by not gathering this risky data, and how much risk is worth taking to gather better data?

Christopher Israel

Christopher Israel

2nd year doctoral student, NDSEG, advised by Dr. Nader Engheta

Christopher is studying wave-matter interaction in metamaterials and metasurfaces with the goal of enhancing communication, computation, and sensing devices. He is applying Inverse-Design methods to develop metamaterial analog computers and spatiotemporal metasurfaces. These technologies hold promise to revolutionize the way devices process information by allowing them to solve complex problems at near the speed of light while consuming a fraction of the energy of conventional methods.

LinkedIn  |  Engheta Group

Keshava Katti

Keshava Katti

4th year doctoral student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. Pratik Chaudhari and Dr. Deep Jariwala
Keshava currently uses mathematical neuron models to build networks that can learn from event volumes, which are streams of spiking information generated by event cameras from visual stimuli. These networks are then applied to robotics tasks such as pose and depth estimation. He plans to design a physical substrate for ensemble-based neural computation with non-volatile memory devices that could more closely emulate self-organization of the mammalian visual cortex.
Sunggun Lee

Sunggun Lee

1st year doctoral student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. George Pappas
Sunggun is interested in building safe and trustworthy AI-enabled autonomous systems. He is exploring the intersection of control theory, robotics, and machine learning to develop approaches that deliver safety and robustness alongside high performance. Ultimately, he aims for autonomy to enhance society while preventing dangerous or uncontrolled behaviors.
Zachary Ravichadran

Zachary Ravichadran

3rd year doctoral student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. Vijay Kumar and Dr. George Pappas
Zac’s research aims to provide robots with the contextual reasoning abilities needed to achieve complex tasks such as disaster response. Zac is particularly interested in a robot’s ability to understand language and sensory information, in order to interpret and react to its environment for a given task. This research applies to single-and multi-robot planning domains in large scale environments.
Raha Riazati

Raha Riazati

2nd year doctoral student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. Firooz Aflatouni
Raha hopes to apply her background in integrated electronics and chip design to the emerging field of silicon photonics, which combines optics and circuit design principles to address a myriad of problems that currently plague silicon electronics. Specifically, Raha is interested in using electronic-photonic co-design to enable low-power, high-speed data transfer and communication.
Jonathan Tan

Jonathan Tan

3rd year doctoral student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. Troy Olsson

LinkedIn  |  BIOTICS Lab

Nandan Tumu

Nandan Tumu

5th year doctoral student, NSF GRFP, advised by Dr. Rahul Mangharam

LinkedIn  |  xLAB