About Me
I am a faculty member in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced. I am excited to help build a new Electrical Engineering department at UC Merced! My research interest is in the mathematical and computational modeling of physical systems to formally design large-scale engineered systems. A flip side of this research that I am excited to explore is the development of scalable (and free!) educational technologies that make classroom learning more interactive and engaging.
For more information on my research: you can browse through the Projects and refer to the Publications page. For more information on my teaching and student feedback: you can browse through the Teaching page. If any of this sounds interesting to you, please do not hesitate to reach out!
In 2023, I finished my PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology. My thesis explores the modeling and analysis of synthetic biological circuits towards modular and scalable design. In 2019, I graduated with a masters in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. Before that, in 2017, I graduated with a bachelors and a masters degree from the Indian Institute of Technoloy (IIT) Kharagpur, India. My Bachelor of Technology degree is in instrumentation engineering and Master of Technology in control systems engineering from the Electrical Engineering department.
Research Interests
- Artificial intelligence for systems modeling
- Control & learning theory
- Synthetic biology
- Interactive engineering educational tools
Group Members
- Alex Frias
- Max Fu
- Aksheen Rathod
- 2024 Summer Students
- Saaketh Raghava, Summer Intern, UC Merced
- Collin Chuang, Volunteer, UC Merced
- Syaun Wallace, CV-PATH Student, Bakersfield College
- Anirudh Kaushal, CV-PATH Student, Bakersfield College
- Areesha Imtiaz, CV-PATH Student, CSU Bakersfield
- Alan Barrios, Cal-Bridge Student, Fresno State University
- Rachit Jaiswal, Volunteer, High School
- William Yang, Volunteer, High School
- Mohit Ramesh Kumar, Volunteer, High School
See the past students page for a list of all students who I have mentored in the past.
Projects
- Safety guarantees and robustness quantification of generative AI models
- Contract-based design for large-scale design of engineered biological systems
- LLM-based personalized grading to enable independent and open-ended summative assessments
- Broadening student participation in electrical engineering with hands-on activities in theoretical courses
- Student self-efficacy in computing at the high school level
Milestones and News
- Jun 2024: Presented our paper at the ASEE conference in Portland. Slides on "Can high school students learn neural networks?".
- May 2024: Participated in the Course Design Institute organized by Teaching Commons at UC Merced.
- Apr 2024: Participated in the ABET Symposium 2024 and the Fundamentals of Assessment Workshop.
- Mar 2024: Attending ACM TS SIGCSE 2024!
- Mar 2024: Check out this Teaching Feedback tool that I designed! It shows two randomly chosen student evaluations that I have received each time.
- Mar 2024: Paper on AI education research accepted for publication at the 2024 ASEE Conference!
- Mar 2024: Awarded a grant by the UC Merced Academic Senate for research on AI safety.
- Dec 2023: Awarded a seed grant from the UC CITRIS institute for research on AI safety. Project is in collaboration with Gireeja Ranade, UC Berkeley.
- Jul 2023: Started as a new faculty member at the University of California, Merced!
- Jun 2023: Successfully defended my Ph.D. at Caltech! Look at me: on Twitter.
Last updated: Jul 1, 2024. All original material on this website is free-to-use and can be shared with proper attribution. You can view the LICENSE here. You can contribute to this page by creating a pull request on GitHub.