Early Career Keynotes

Negar Mehr

Bio: Negar Mehr is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, where she directs the Berkeley Intelligent Control (ICON) Lab. Her research focuses on multi-agent interactions. Her lab develops learning-based methods grounded in game theory and control to enable robots to interact safely and intelligently with humans and other autonomous agents. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2019 and was subsequently a postdoctoral scholar in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Before returning to Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the ASME Rising Star Award, and First Prize in the IEEE ITSS Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award.

Roberto Martin-Martin

Bio: Roberto Martín-Martín is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Robot Interactive Intelligence Lab (RobIn). He builds robotic systems that learn in the real world, studying how robots can acquire useful skills from people and physical interaction, learn safely from limited experience, and keep improving continuously over time. He pursues these questions through mobile and whole-body manipulation, contact-rich interaction, and long-horizon tasks in everyday environments. Alongside his work on physical robots, he has helped create simulation platforms and benchmarks that let researchers develop and test robot learning at scale, including Robosuite, iGibson, BEHAVIOR, and OopsieVerse.

He earned his Ph.D. at TU Berlin under Oliver Brock and conducted postdoctoral research at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab with Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese. His work has received the RSS Best Systems Paper Award, ICRA Best Paper Award, and IROS Best Mechanism Award, and he was part of the winning team of the first Amazon Picking Challenge. His individual honors include the NSF CAREER Award, Amazon Faculty Award, Meta Research Award and TRI Young Faculty Researcher Award, along with recognition as an RSS Pioneer and early-career distinctions from AAAI and IJCAI. He also serves the robotics community as Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mobile Manipulation and as a co-founder of QueerInRobotics.

Hang Zhao

Bio: Hang Zhao is an Assistant Professor at IIIS, Tsinghua University, and a co-founder of Galaxea AI, a robotics startup. His research spans foundation models for robot manipulation, agile whole-body locomotion, and vision-centric autonomous driving. Before joining Tsinghua, he was a research scientist at Waymo. He received his Ph.D. from MIT, advised by Professor Antonio Torralba.