When I joined a FIRST robotics team in high school, I never envisioned it would set the stage for the rest of my career. On my team, Mountaineer Area RoboticS (MARS 2614), I immediately took an interest in the autonomous portion of the competition, learning what it took to make robots perform tasks without direct human control. My interest in robotic autonomy continued during my time as an undergraduate, where I was a founding member of the West Virginia University (WVU) team competing in the NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge. My experience developing the mission planning autonomy for our robot Cataglyphis taught me a lot about the challenges of making robots work in complex real-world situations. Motivated to continue exploring ways to solve these challenges, I transitioned into graduate school at WVU, pursuing a Ph.D., and studying autonomous robotic decision-making and ways to make robot autonomy more generalizable to challenging real-world situations.

Outside of my research, I also volunteer as a mentor to students interested in robotics. I have mentored students on my former FIRST robotics team MARS, I have mentored several FIRST Lego League middle school robotics teams, and I have led robotics educational activities and given presentations at numerous science camps and events. I also mentor younger students working in my lab, both undergraduate and graduate, teaching them technical skills and providing guidance on their research.

In addition to my life as a robotics researcher, I am a high voltage electricity and Tesla coil enthusiast. I have been building Tesla coils and other high voltage devices since high school, but in the summer of 2020, I decided to pursue something I had always been interested in doing, which was to make a YouTube channel around my high voltage hobby. My channel, Coil Labs, is all about building crazy high voltage devices and other “extreme science” projects and explaining how they work in an informative, but entertaining manner.