Valmiki Kothare

I am currently a Robotics Engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in the Jazayeri Lab at the Brain and Cognitive Science department. My current research focuses on biologically-informed motion planning for dexterous manipulation, using neural data to regularize reinforcement learning agents for sample-efficient training and superior generalization to out-of-distribution stimuli. 

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and minor in Robotics. During those years, I worked in the Biorobotics Lab, where focused on deterministic, runtime- and memory-efficient graph search for robot motion planning. 

I am broadly interested in exploring the intersection of data-driven, experiential learning and deterministic algorithms to achieve robust robot autonomy with optimality and safety guarantees.

Outside of academics and work, I am an avid climber and have been known to indulge in the occasional game of  table tennis or chess (if I can convince my labmates to play). I find traveling extremely fulfilling and make an effort to meet new, interesting people wherever I go. I am also a self-proclaimed home chef, with such accolades as the "lumpy sourdough loaf" and the "hypernatremia fried rice."

Feel free to download my CV amd resume, have a look at my recent research, and check out my projects from the past few years.