- NEW (Sep 2025): Ph.D. positions available (early start dates possible!) in control theory and engineering education research. Send me an email with your resume if you are interested.
- NEW (Sep 2025): Paid research positions for students currently enrolled at UC Merced. Official application link coming soon.
- If you are a student at UC Merced interested in learning more about research on AI safety, control theory, and engineering education you can find a list of available projects here. Send me an email with your interests and your resume/CV.
- If you have support from another university/fellowship/thesis program, send me an email with the details.
About Me
I am a tenure-track faculty member in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced. Before joining UC Merced, I completed my Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech working with Richard M Murray. I am interested in research on control theory and formal system modeling and design with the following goals:
- Can we embed provable guarantees into data-driven methods? For example, is it possible for transformer neural networks to have Lyapunov-like safety and robustness guarantees in controlling physical systems?
- Can we formally quantify safety and robustness in scenarios where we know that models might fail? Application examples include control of biomolecular networks and autonmous vehicles.
Control theory:
feedback control, robustness, safety representations
AI:
transformers, hallucinations, verifiable safety metrics, mechanistic interpretability
Applications:
synthetic biology, autonomous vehicles, cell-free systems, biomolecular networks
A flip side of this research on computational modeling that I am interested in is the development of scalable (and free!) educational technologies that make classroom learning more interactive and engaging. I am interested in answering the following questions:
- How does first-generation status impact students' creative exploration in their engineering education?
- What educational technologies are most effective in engaging *every* student in a classroom?
Education research:
impact of AI, open-ended assessments, directed mentoring
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 the above sounds interesting to you, please do not hesitate to email me at ayushpandey at ucmerced dot edu
Short Biography (third person): Ayush Pandey is interested in research on control theory, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence for the formal design of physical systems. Over the past few years, his research has focused on the development of robustness metrics, safety guarantees, and new inference tools for nonlinear dynamical systems in various application areas. He is also actively extending his research on computational modeling to build open-source educational tools that make classroom learning more interactive, engaging, and student-centered. In 2023, Ayush Pandey received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology. In 2019, he graduated with a masters in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. Before that, in 2017, he graduated with a bachelors and a masters degree from the Electrical Engineering department at the Indian Institute of Technoloy (IIT) Kharagpur, India.
Group Members
| Harshini Nujella | Julio Salgado | Alan Arevalo | Adrian Hernandez |
| Axel Muniz Tello | Prerana Somarapu | Aizen Baidya | Nelida Salgado |
See the past students page for a list of all students who I have mentored in the past.
Projects
- Revolutionizing engineering education using collaborative design and integration of sociotechnical modules
- Safety guarantees and robustness quantification of generative AI models
- Robust design and analysis of engineered biological systems
- LLM-based personalized grading to enable independent and open-ended summative assessments
- Student self-efficacy in computing at the high school level
Milestones and News
- Sep 2025: NEW: Paid undergraduate (UCM) and graduate student researcher (open for all) positions available in the areas of control theory (and intersections with AI), engineering education, and AI for education.
- Aug 2025: Invited to give a talk at the AI for Power Systems workshop at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab
- Jul 2025: My paper on "Parameter Robustness in Data-Driven Estimation of Dynamical Systems" was accepted for publication in the 64th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2025) at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Read the paper here: arXiv 2509:06534
- Jun 2025: Our team won a $1mn NSF RED grant on "Adapting Design Thinking to Transform the Professional Development of Electrical Engineers in California's Central Valley". I will be leading all project activities. If you are interested in collaborating, please reach out!
- Jun 2025: Our abstract on compartment-based modeling of biological systems using BioCRNpyler was accepted as a poster presentation at the Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution, and Design (SEED 2025) conference. Read about the work here: BioCRNpyler
- Jun 2025: Two ASEE papers from the group at the ASEE annual symposium: Flexigrader and Thematic
- May 2025: Our EE 005 students presented their robot designs at our annual freshman design competition!
- Apr 2025: Invited to participate in the NSF NAIRR AI Unlocked Workshop at Denver, Colorado.
- Mar 2025: Two papers accepted for publication in ASEE 2025! Congratulations to Alex, Shri, and Thomas!
- Jan 2025: Patent granted on "Autonomous two-wheeler with dual model of locomotion". Indian Patent: 558183.
- Jan 2025: Pacti (pacti.org, Incer et al.) paper was published in ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems. DOI: 10.1145/3704736
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