Alex Samland

Alex is a PhD student in the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University, where he completed his thesis on emergent behavior in robotic swarms in Todd Murphey’s lab. He then spent four years at Outrider working on autonomous yard trucks, contributing to both the safety stack and the motion planning and controls stack. That experience left him interested in what it takes for autonomous systems to remain reliably safe and performant across the variability of real-world deployments. His research interests lie in leveraging machine learning, control theory, and optimization to develop safe navigation algorithms that hold up under these conditions. Outside the lab, he enjoys running, exploring Seattle’s cortado scene, and all things alpine.