Elena had been a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Robotics Department at U-M since August 2022. Her research interest was in developing autonomous unmanned vehicles that were capable of intelligent planning and decision-making. As a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, she continued working on developing model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that enabled autonomous agents to generalize and adapt to unseen real-world environments.
Prior to joining U-M, she had been a Section Supervisor and Senior Professional Staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Her dissertation was on modeling the system dynamics of the cyclocopter and developing control strategies for a novel transformer drone with ground, air, and surface modes of operation.
- AI Mentor: Katie Skinner, Robotics, College of Engineering
- Science Mentor: Dimitra Panagou, Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering