I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and Director of the New Dexterity research group. I am interested in equipping robots with dexterous manipulation capabilities and enabling humans to regain their lost dexterity or augment their performance, modeling, designing and controlling new robotics and bionics hardware. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the GRAB Lab at Yale University working with Prof. Aaron Dollar. My postdoctoral research focused on hybrid schemes that combine analytical models, constrained optimization methods, and machine learning techniques to simplify robust grasping, dexterous, in-hand manipulation and haptic object identification using adaptive robot hands. During my PhD studies, I worked under the supervision of Prof. Kostas Kyriakopoulos in the Control Systems Lab and my research focused on EMG-based decoding of human motion and intention for the control of robotic and prosthetic devices in structured and dynamic environments.
