Leadership and Management Experience

Throughout my life, I've always taken on strong leadership roles, in many different settings, and in many different capacities. A sampling of some of these types of roles follows.

Director of MOBIUS Group

July 2015 - Present; University of Nevada, Reno (UNR): I established the MOBIUS (Multiagent, Multi-Objective, Bioinspired Intelligent Unmanned Systems) Group at UNR. I recruited graduate and undergraduate students to pursue research in autonomous and learning algorithms to optimize large, messy systems. As of October 2016, 13 students (2 Ph.D., 5 MS, and 6 undergraduate) work with the MOBIUS group. I have developed on-boarding procedures and continue meet regularly with the students to help them develop their own research identities.

I work across departmental lines to find new collaboration opportunities for proposals, with collaborations as varied as Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Anthropology. As of October 2016, 100% of all full-time graduate students working with MOBIUS are supported financially.

ALA Workshop Co-Chair at AAMAS 2015, 2016

Fall 2014 - Spring 2015; Istanbul, Turkey // Fall 2015 - Spring 2016; Singapore, Singapore: I was selected as a co-chair for the Adaptive and Learning Agents workshop (ALA) held annually at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). Involves submitting the workshop proposal to AAMAS, recruiting reviewers, advertising the workshop, developing supporting websites, conducting the workshop at AAMAS, and coordination post-proceedings

University Class Teaching

Spring 2016: I have developed a course in Autonomous and Learning-Based Controls for robotics applications, to be taught as a special topics course. Expected enrollment is 30 students.

Fall 2016; UNR: I taught ME410 (Control Systems) at UNR to 107 students.

Spring 2016; UNR: I taught ME410 at UNR to 13 students.

Fall 2015; UNR: In my first semester as an Assistant Professor, I taught ME410 at UNR to 128 students.

Winter 2012; OSU: As a Ph.D. student, I taught ENGR 212 (Dynamics) at Oregon State University, and was the sole instructor to 106 students. I coordinated 2 graduate TAs and 5 undergraduate TAs to help the students succeed.

Mentor: Saturday Academy

Summer 2011; OSU: I mentored two high school students who temporarily joined my lab at Oregon State, ages 15 and 17. I instructed them in the basics of reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms, and multiagent systems, and guided them in learning the C++ language. By the end of the summer, one had produced a multiagent grid world with reinforcement learners, and the other had produced a multiagent traveling salesman problem with an evolutionary algorithm solver.

Mentor: Research Experiences for Undergraduates

Summer 2014; OSU: I mentored two undergraduates (Physics, Mechanical Engineering) who temporarily joined my lab at Oregon State. I taught them the basics of multiagent systems, and started them on cutting-edge research projects. These projects were  submitted to international conferences, and one was accepted to GECCO 2015.