Building the next generation

Mentorship across high school, undergraduate, and graduate research, with publications at ICRA, RoboSoft, and BSN and placements at Google, Microsoft, Medtronic, and Ethicon.

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5Teaching roles
2021–2026

2Semesters as
Instructor of Record

15Students mentored

2PhD students

4Graduate

6Undergraduate

3High school

Reimagining Surgery for Rural Needs: Robotics Teleoperation

Instructor of Record · 2025–26 · Team Lead & Project Manager

Completed Bass Connections course (Fall 2025–Spring 2026): teleoperated laser surgery for rural clinics, optomechanical assembly, and hardware/software integration. Course evaluation: 4.25/5 (Fall 2025).

Project Website Mentorship profile Team feature

Intro to Medical Robotics

Guest Lecturer · 2024, 2025, 2026 · Course instructor: Brian Mann · Siobhan Oca

ML for Medical Robotics and Design of Experiments. Scaffolded self-learning for diverse experience levels.

Engineering Technology in Biomedical Applications

Guest Lecturer · Spring 2026 · ME/BME 555 · Course instructor: Pei Zhong

Robotics and AI for Laser Surgery: multimodal sensing, learning, neural state representations, and custom optomechanical hardware.

Collaborative Expeditions

Curriculum Developer · 2024 · Course instructor: Siobhan Oca

Self-learning modules on DOE, ML, Literature Review with reflections and case studies.

Experiment Design & Research Methods

TA · 2021–22 · Course instructor: George Delagrammatikas

Research scoping, rapid prototyping, portfolio development. 3 semesters.

Students & Outcomes

PhD students · 2

Vincent Wang PhD student

Duke Ph.D. candidate — Safety critical controls for precision robotic surgery

Ongoing

Tarun Vinodkumar PhD student

Johns Hopkins University — Autonomous robots for stroke intervention

Ongoing

Graduate students · 4

Yongjun Lu Graduate

Duke — Ultrasonic Aspirator

→ Clinical OR data acquisition · Ethicon, J&J

Caroline Chen Graduate

Duke MS — Segmentation

→ ISMR 2024 (Poster) · ML Engineer, Google

Changxin Yu Graduate

Duke MS — OCT Segmentation

→ 3rd Prize Symposium · Microsoft

Antony Farrand Graduate

Duke MS — Acoustic Surgery

→ Duke MEMS Poster Symposium

Undergraduate students · 6

Devi Yuliarti Undergraduate

Duke — Tactile Sensor

→ IEEE-RAS RoboSoft 2026 (Co-first author), IEEE ICRA 2026

Zacharias Chen Undergraduate

Duke — Tissue Boundary

→ IEEE-EMBS BSN 2025, ICRA ELSR Workshop · Medtronic Hugo; IEEE TMRB submission (conditionally accepted)

Nikhil Aaryath Undergraduate

Duke — UA Tissue

→ Robotic data pipeline

Alexa Cahilig Undergraduate

Duke — Multimodal Tissue Boundary Test Bench

→ IEEE ICRA ELSR Poster 2025, IEEE-EMBS BSN 2025 Paper

Aakriti Undergraduate

IIT Bombay — Mechano-Acoustic Speech Information

→ Acoustic feature analysis and experimental characterization

Akshit Srivastava Undergraduate

IIT Bombay — Mechano-Acoustic Speech Information

→ Contributed to characterization and analysis

High school students · 3

Sarah Dias High School

HS — Tissue Boundary

→ IEEE-EMBS BSN 2025, ICRA ELSR Workshop; IEEE TMRB submission (conditionally accepted)

Prithu Kolar High School

NCSSM — Acoustic/Video

→ IEEE-EMBS BSN 2025 · Park Scholar, NC State

Felicity Lipchak High School

NCSSM — Acoustic/Video

→ Dartmouth College