Ayush Pandey

About Me

Prospective students:
  • If you are a student at UC Merced, 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.
  • If you are an international graduate student from one of the countries listed here and would like to collaborate, go to the IEEE CSS Fellowship and send me an email if there's a fit.
  • Students interested in a graduate degree from EECS at UC Merced, please visit the EECS page for admission details.

I am a tenure-track faculty member in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced. I am interested in research on control theory and formal system modeling and design with the following goals:

Specific research keywords under these questions are:

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:

Here are some keywords that describe my research in this area:

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

  1. Alex Frias
  2. Saaketh Raghava
  3. Prerana Somarapu
  4. Axel Muniz Tello
  5. Aizen Baidya
  6. Rudra Mukherjee
  7. Chandra Govindarajan

See the past students page for a list of all students who I have mentored in the past.

Projects

  1. Safety guarantees and robustness quantification of generative AI models
  2. Robust design and analysis of engineered biological systems
  3. LLM-based personalized grading to enable independent and open-ended summative assessments
  4. Broadening student participation in electrical engineering with hands-on activities in theoretical courses
  5. Student self-efficacy in computing at the high school level

Milestones and News

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