Principal Investigator
Veronica J. Santos, Ph.D.
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Biography: Veronica J. Santos is a Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the UCLA Biomechatronics Lab. She earned her 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 earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering with a biometry minor from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2004 and 2007, respectively, with Dr. Francisco J. Valero-Cuevas. From 2007 to 2008, she was a postdoctoral research associate with Dr. Gerald E. Loeb 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 has served as an Editor of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and as an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction and Editor-in-Chief for the 2020 IEEE Haptics Symposium.
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 the Defense Science Study Group (2018-2019), for a UCLA Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dept. Teaching Award (2016-2017), for an ASU Young Investigator Award (2014), for two ASU Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Top 5% Teaching Awards (2012, 2013), as a Lindseth Lecturer by the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University (2012), for a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development CAREER Award (2010), and as an attendee at the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium (2010)
Google Scholar citations
Ph.D. Students
Kenneth Gutierrez
Research Interests: artificial tactile perception, machine learning, manipulation of deformable linear objects
Awards and Honors: Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship (2019-2020), National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award (2015-2019), National Science Foundation “Bridge to the Doctorate” Fellow (2014)
Alireza Haji Fathaliyan
Research Interests: 3D gaze tracking for action recognition to enhance human-robot collaboration
Concurrently: Data Scientist at Meredith Corporation
Shengxin Jia
Research Interests: artificial tactile perception within granular media
Eric Peltola
Research Interests: modeling of human hand kinematics, underwater tactile sensor skins
Lionel Zhang
Research Interests: granular media jamming, artificial tactile perception in granular media
Awards and Honors: UCLA MAE Dept. Outstanding TA Award (2018-2019)
Not pictured:
- Claire Hsu
- Aileen Villalpando
- Xiaoyu Wang
- Huajing Zhao
- Yi Zheng
M.S. Students
Not pictured:
- Barbara Boyajian
Undergraduate Students
Not pictured:
- Nicholas Camarena
- Angela Gao (UC LEADS, UCLA)
- Aidan Montiel
- Sruthi Mukkamala
- Hung Pham
- Christina Rice
- Cole Ten (UCLA-SMC)
- Ryan Wong
- Jeremy Wong
- Annalise Wulf
- Keano Zamora
High School Students
Not pictured:
- Emma Cruz
