I am a postdoctoral scholar in the Automatic Control Lab at ETH Zürich working with John Lygeros and Roy Smith. Before coming here, I did my PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington with Mehran Mesbahi on distributed control theory.
I work on problems involving the control and estimation of networked dynamical systems, with an emphasis on applications related to sustainability. In particular, using algebraic graph theory, I study how the structure of the network affects the performance of distributed control, estimation, and optimization algorithms. My target domain is the coordination of smart buildings and energy hubs, and how they can be interconnected with the electric grid and other utilities to provide services to suppliers, such as demand-side management and peak shaving. I also work aerospace applications, focusing on the guidance, navigation, and control of multi-vehicle systems. These range from swarms of UAVs to distributed satellite systems. In my previous life as an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, I worked at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics under the supervision of James Owen. We studied how X-ray heating contributes to the dispersal of protoplanetary discs. I also had the good fortune to work with Richard Marchand and Richard Sydora at the University of Alberta, where we worked on how to use electrodynamics space tethers for removing radiation belts around the Earth. In my final year, I did two Honours theses. I worked with Greg Martin on the Hilbert-Pólya and pair-correlation conjectures, and with Joanna Karczmarek’s string theory group studying the geometry of membranes emerging from the Berenstein-Dzienkowski Hamiltonian.