We are looking for talented PhD students who are excited about computer vision, natural language understanding, and machine learning for robotics. If you are interested in joining us, consider applying to TTIC.

Previous Members

Research Assistant Professors

• Mohit Bansal (Currently a Parker Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Hongyuan Mei (Currently a Member of the Technical Staff at xAI)
• Audrey Sedal (Currently an Assistant Professor at McGill University)
• Bradly Stadie (Currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University)

PhD Students

• Zhongtian ("Falcon") Dai, "On Reward Structures of Markov Decision Processes", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, August 2023
  (Currently a Machine Learning Researcher at Symbolica AI)
• Andrea F. Daniele, "Accessible Interfaces for the Development and Deployment of Robotic Platforms", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, May 2023
  (Currently a Staff Simulation Software Engineer at Boston Dynamics)
• Jiading Fang, "Embodied Spatial Intelligence: From 3D Perception to 3D Reasoning", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, August 2025
  (Currently a Software Engineer at Waymo)
• Tri Huynh, "Universal Neural Memory Architectures: Multigrid Connectivity, Domain-Agnostic Geometry, and Local Operators", University of Chicago, May 2021, Co-advised by Michael Maire
  (Currently a Software Engineer at Google)
• Shengjie Lin, "Scalable 3D Scene Understanding and Embodied Reasoning for Robotics", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, July 2026
  (Currently a Robotics Engineer at Dexterity, Inc.)
• Keziah Naggita, "Shaping Human-AI Interactions to Provide Improvement Pathways and Balance Competing Objectives", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, August 2026, Co-advised by Avrim Blum
• Chip Schaff, "Neural Approaches to Co-Optimization in Robotics", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, August 2022
  (Currently an Autopilot Engineer at Tesla)
• Igor Vasiljevic, "Neural Camera Models", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, June 2022, Co-advised by Greg Shakhnarovich
  (Currently a Research Scientist in Machine Learning at Toyota Research Institute (TRI))
• Takuma Yoneda, "Generative Modeling Perspective for Control and Reasoning in Robotics", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, August 2024
  (Currently a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind)
• David Yunis, "From the Loss Landscape to Diverse Feature Learning in Neural Networks", Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, August 2026
  (Currently an ML Researcher at Jane Street)

MS Students

• Bharat Chandar, "Grasping With Visual and Semantic Features", University of Chicago, July 2016, Co-advised by Yali Amit
  (Currently a Research Scientist at Stanford University)
• Andrea F. Daniele, "Learning to Generate Natural Language Instructions for Navigation", Sapienzà di Roma, January 2017, Co-advised with Daniele Nardi
  (Currently a Staff Simulation Software Engineer at Boston Dynamics)
• Hongyuan Mei, "Natural Language Processing with Attention-based Neural Networks", University of Chicago, August 2016, Co-advised by Mohit Bansal
  (Currently a Member of the Technical Staff at xAI)
• Ben Picker, "The Hips as a Four-Bar Linkage System: Using Reinforcement Learning to Explore Compensation Patterns in Patients with Leg Length Discrepancies", University of Chicago, May 2022, Co-advised by Yali Amit
  (Currently a Software Engineer at Bloomberg)
• Huanyu Zhang, "Statler: State-Maintaining Language Models for Embodied Reasoning", University of Chicago, May 2024, Co-advised by Yali Amit

BS Students

• Matthew Jeung, "Towards Programmable Matter: Design and Interaction for Modular Robotic Systems", University of Chicago,
  (Currently a PhD student at Northwestern University)
• Zachary Robertson, "Imitation Learning from Observation", University of Chicago,
  (Currently a PhD student at Stanford University)

Visiting Students

• Justin Chan (Currently a BS student at the Illinois Institute of Technology)
• Cha Chen (Currently a Software Engineer at Apple)
• Lorand Cheng (Currently a Research Engineer at 1X)
• Hang Chu (Currently a Principal Research Scientist at Autodesk AI Lab)
• Julian Coward (Currently a Technical Support Engineer at iManage)
• Rasool Fakoor (Currently a Member of the Technical Staff at Boson AI)
• Colin Flaherty (Currently a Research Scientist at Augment)
• Adam Frison (Currently a BS student at the University of Chicago)
• Alex Gajewski (Currently a Co-founder of Pantograph)
• Asher Grossman (Currently a BS student at the University of Chicago)
• Yuchen He (Currently a Co-founder of humans&)
• Davide Iafrate (Currently a Robotics Engineer at Duckietown)
• Ajay Jayaraman (Currently a Software Engineer at Astemo Ltd.)
• Matthew Jeung (Currently a PhD student at Northwestern University)
• Tianchong Jiang (Currently a PhD student at TTIC)
• Justin Jung (Currently a Research Scientist at Biohub)
• Dong Ki Kim (Currently a Research Scientist at Field AI)
• Hung Le (Currently a PhD student at Princeton University)
• Xiang Li (Currently a PhD student at Stony Brook University)
• Peng Li, Co-advised by Hongyuan Mei (Currently an MS student at Fudan University)
• Arthur MacKeith (Currently a PhD student at Yale University)
• Lei Mao (Currently a Systems Software Engineer at Meta)
• Devshi Mehrotra (Currently Co-founder and CEO of JusticeText)
• Jonathan Michaux (Currently a Technical Lead at Novarna)
• Takeru Oba (Currently a PhD student at Toyota Technological Institute)
• Felix Odenthal (Currently a BS student at the University of Chicago)
• Tomás Quinteros (Currently a BS student at the University of Chicago)
• Alea Ritchie (Currently a BS student at Stanford University)
• Michael Rodgers (Currently an HS teacher at Chicago Vocational Career Academy)
• Nikita Rudrapati (Currently a BS student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Ritika Rudrapati (Currently a BS student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Angel Santiago (Currently a BS student at the University of Puerto Rico)
• Ethan Schondorf, Co-supervised with Audrey Sedal (Currently a Software Engineer at Globus Labs)
• Bobby Shi (Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing)
• Benjamin Stoddart (Currently a BS student at the University of Michigan)
• Luzhe Sun (Currently a PhD student at TTIC)
• Xiangshan ("Vincent") Tan (Currently a PhD student at TTIC)
• Yota Urano
• Kevin Wu (Currently a PhD student at New York University)
• Zhengyang Wu (Currently a Senior Deep Learning Engineer at Magic Leap)
• David Yunis (Currently an ML Researcher at Jane Street)
• Xiaopeng Zhang (Currently a PhD student at Rutgers University)

Outreach Program Participants

• James Alvarado (Currently a Technology Architecture Senior Analyst at Accenture)
• Fatmata Bah
• Jehovanah Blahoua (Currently a BS student at Illinois State University)
• Cristian Cabada (Currently an Audio and Visual Field Engineer at Daktronics)
• Julian Coward (Currently a Technical Support Engineer at iManage)
• Betsy Gonzalez
• Bryce Harris (Currently an HS student at Lindblom Math and Science Academy)
• Alex Ho
• Nina Lewis
• Geno Lewis (Currently a Software Engineer at IBM)
• Janelle McCallum (Currently an HS student at King College Prep)
• Jayla McGraw (Currently a BS student at Xavier University of Louisiana)
• Tyler McKinily (Currently an HS student at Lindblom Math and Science Academy)
• Alonso Morales (Currently a BS student at the Illinois Institute of Technology)
• Ali Muhammad (Currently a BS student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• Jonathan Padua (Currently a BS student at the University of Illinois at Chicago)
• Jae'Lyn Prewitt (Currently a BS student at Illinois State University)
• Emma Quansh (Currently a BS student at Case Western Reserve University)
• Dylan Sumaya Lobo
• Daksh Vermareddy (Currently a BS student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Syncere Williams (Currently an HS student at Hyde Park Academy)