Talks
Research and outreach talks on robotic manipulation, dexterous hands and wrists, and the path into engineering.
Research Talks
DexWrist and KaRMA: Hardware Priors for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation
August 2026 · German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics
An invited talk at DLR, hosted by Sebastian Wolf, on hardware priors for dexterous manipulation, covering both the DexWrist robotic wrist and the KaRMA dexterity metric.
DexWrist at NEMS 2026
June 2026 · New England Manipulation Symposium
Presented DexWrist, a compliant, back-drivable robotic wrist for constrained and dynamic manipulation, at the New England Manipulation Symposium.
DexWrist at Two RSS 2025 Workshops
June 2025 · Robotics: Science and Systems
Presented DexWrist at the RSS 2025 Hardware Intelligence and Dexterous Manipulation workshops, including policy-rollout results on constrained tasks such as reaching into a packed fridge.
“Sumo Robots” — SpaceX
February 2024 · SpaceX Starship Engineer On-Site Presentation
A technical presentation on my Caltech ME72 sumo robot.
“Robots that Fight, Robots that Fly, and Robots that Place Dominos” — NASA JPL
April 2023 · JPL Seminar
A talk to the JPL robotics community on combat robotics, drone design, and the ME134 domino-placing robot.
“The Phone Drone” — SpaceX
January 2023 · SpaceX On-Site Interview
A technical presentation on the Phone Drone, a photography drone built around a gimbal-mounted smartphone camera.
Outreach
“Robotic Hands & Wrists” — Discover Mechanical Engineering, MIT
August 2025
A research talk to roughly 30 incoming MIT first-years on why robotic hands and wrists are the current frontier in robotics: how hands are categorized, a century of designs from early prostheses to modern dexterous hands, and today’s learning-driven return of highly actuated designs. I closed on my own work with DexWrist.
Newburgh Free Academy P-TECH — Summer 2025
July 2025
I returned to Newburgh Free Academy’s P-TECH program, the one I came up through, to talk with incoming students about getting from a P-TECH associate’s degree to engineering research, framed around what I would tell my own ninth-grade self. One slide read “Tip #1: Stay busy, take every opportunity.”
Newburgh Free Academy P-TECH — Summer 2023
July 2023
I visited the summer P-TECH cohort to talk about Caltech and the path into engineering, and to answer their questions about college and careers.
P-TECH Alumni Round Table
July 2023
I joined a panel of P-TECH alumni for a Q&A with current and incoming students about the program and where it can lead.
