Heng Yang

I am an incoming (Fall 2023) Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. I obtained my Ph.D. in Robotics in 2022 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I was fortunate to work with Luca Carlone in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.

I am currently a research scientist in the NVIDIA Autonomous Vehicle Research Group led by Marco Pavone.

Computational Robotics: I am building a computational robotics research group at Harvard University. My group is broadly interested in the algorithmic foundations of robot perception, action, and learning. Our vision is to enable safe and trustworthy autonomy for a broad range of high-integrity robotics applications, by designing tractable and provably correct algorithms that enjoy rigorous performance guarantees, developing fast implementations, and validating them on real robotic systems.

Current Interests: I am currently interested in three challenges.

• Trustworthy robot perception with learned modules
• Perception-based planning and control with performance guarantees
• Convex optimization for estimation, decision-making, and learning

Read more about some of these topics in the sample research statement (November 2021).

Prospective Students: For PhD opportunities, please apply to the PhD program at Harvard SEAS (e.g., in EE/CS/AM/ME) and list me as a potential advisor. I am also open to taking (undergraduate or graduate) research interns.

Postdoc Fellow: We have open Postdoc Fellow positions in Learning, Optimization, Control, and/or Robotics. Please apply here.

I am interested in working with self-motivated candidates with (a) a strong theoretical and computational background (e.g., applied math, optimization and control, statistics, machine learning, and scientific computing), and/or (b) rich experiences in real robotic platforms (e.g., drones, manipulators, ground vehicles).

Due to the large volume of inquiries, I may not be able to reply to all emails, and I apologize for this.