Professor Nisar Ahmed

Dr. Ahmed received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in January 2012, focusing on Dynamics, Systems and Controls with minors in ECE and Applied Math. From 2012-2013, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Cornell Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) with Professor Mark Campbell. He obtained his B.S. in Engineering (summa cum laude) in 2006 from The Cooper Union in his hometown of New York City. He joined the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at CU Boulder as an Assistant Professor in 2014.

Prof. Ahmed’s CV (periodically updated) and Google Scholar page.

Graduate Students

Stephen McGuire (Ph.D. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Steve holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University, and previously flew helicopters for the Marines and worked with Astrobotic. A NASA NSTRF Fellow, his research focuses on human-autonomy teaming for long-term and long-distance space exploration missions.

Brett Israelsen (Ph.D. student, Computer Science)

Brett comes from the other side of the mountains in Utah, and has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Chemical Engineering. A former process controls engineer for Corning in upstate NY, his research focuses on statistical machine learning methods for human-autonomy teaming.

personal website

Luke Burks (Ph.D. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Luke calls Arkansas home, and earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from University of Arkansas. His research focuses on formal integrated planning and perception strategies for human-robot information gathering missions.

Steven Dourmashkin (Ph.D. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Steven is the newest member of the lab, and earned his B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University in 2016. He is currently doing research on scalable decentralized data fusion strategies for cooperative GPS-denied navigation.

David Iglesias (M.S. Student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

David hails from Spain and is a Balsells International Fellow at CU Boulder. His research is on event-triggered non-linear estimation for communication-based cooperative localization in multi-robot networks.  

Undergraduate Students

Jeremy Muesing (B.S. Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Class of 2017)

Jeremy is Colorado native and AES senior minoring in Astrophysics. As a Discovery Learning Apprentice (DLA) research student for 2016-2017, he is also researching acoustic target localization for cooperative human-robot search missions.

Sierra Williams (B.S. Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Class of 2017)

Sierra is a Colorado native and an AES senior who is also pursuing a minor in Computer Science. She is one of the first undergrads EVER to join lab back in Spring 2015.

Ian Loefgren (B.S. Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Class of 2019)

Ian is an AES junior and the newest member of the undergrad team, joining the lab in 2016. 

Lab Alumni

Nicholas Sweet (M.S. Aerospace Engineering Sciences, 2016)

M.S. Thesis: “Semantic Likelihood Models for Bayesian Inference in Human-Robot Interaction”

Currently employed at Maidbot (Austin, TX).

Matthew Aitken (M.S. Aerospace Engineering Sciences, 2016)

M.S. Thesis: “Assured Human-Autonomy Interaction through Machine Self-Confidence”

Currently employed at Draper (Cambridge, MA).