Dr. Ian Abraham is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Yale University. His research group is focused on developing real-time optimal control methods for robotic search and exploration, and data-efficient learning. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the Biorobotics Lab. He received his PhD. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University and the B.S. degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Rutgers University. During his Ph.D. he also worked at the NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab where he worked on robust model-based control for large parameter uncertainty.
His research interest lies at the intersection of robotics, optimal control, machine learning, and artificial intelligence with a focus on active sensing and learning. He is the recipient of the 2023 Best Paper Award at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, the 2019 King-Sun Fu IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper award, the Northwestern Belytschko Outstanding Research award for his dissertation, and the 2023 NSF CAREER award.