Principal Investigator
Veronica J. Santos, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Biography: Veronica J. Santos is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the UCLA Biomechatronics Lab. She received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering with a music minor from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. From 2000 to 2001, she was a Quality Engineer and Research and Development Engineer at Guidant Corporation in Santa Clara, CA, specializing in life-saving cardiovascular technology. Dr. Santos received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering with a biometry minor from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2004 and 2007, respectively. From 2007 to 2008, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California where she worked on a team to develop a novel biomimetic tactile sensor for prosthetic hands. From 2008 to 2014, Dr. Santos was an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program at Arizona State University, where she directed the ASU Biomechatronics Lab. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, and Editor of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
Research Interests: grasp and manipulation, hand biomechanics, haptics, human-machine systems, machine learning, machine perception, neural control of movement, prosthetics, robotics, stochastic modeling, tactile sensors
Awards and Honors: Selected for an ASU Young Investigator Award (2014) and two ASU Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Top 5% Teaching Awards (2012, 2013), Selected as a Lindseth Lecturer by the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University (2012), National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development CAREER Award (2010), Selected attendee for participation in the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium (2010)
UCLA webpage, Curriculum Vitae, Google Scholar citations
Postdoctoral Researchers
Randall Hellman, Ph.D.
Research Interests: robotic hands, actuation for tendon-driven mechanisms, haptic perception, machine learning, reinforcement learning
Awards and Honors: Arizona State University Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering University Graduate Fellowship (2013)
Personal webpage, Curriculum Vitae
Ph.D. students
Kenneth Gutierrez
Research Interests: haptic perception, machine learning
Awards and Honors: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award (2015), National Science Foundation “Bridge to the Doctorate” Fellow (2014)
Not pictured:
- Alireza Haji Fathaliyan
- Shengxin Jia
- Xiaoyu Wang
- Cheng-Ju “Jimmy” Wu
- Yi Zheng
Undergraduate students
Not pictured:
- Philip Bauer
- Sahm Bazargan
- Kathryn Benson
- Kristen Biermayer
- Thomas Chun
- David Egen
- Shawn Footitt
- Albert Lin
- Shawn Lu
- Jimmy Penaloza
- Ryan Poon
- Kate Schweidel
- Timothy Stickles
- Steven Yin
- Bryan Zhong
Other lab members
Not pictured:
- Eric Peltola
- George Geha
- Peter Aspinall
- Agraj Sobti
- Michael Zakariaie
