Karen Leung

Karen Leung is a Ph.D. candidate in the Aeronautics & Astronautics department, where she also received her Master's degree in 2017. Prior to her studies at Stanford, Karen graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Science with First Class Honors in 2014, majoring in Aeronautical (Space) and Mathematics (Advanced). She also held a summer internship at Toyota Research Institute.

The goal of her research is to harness the advances in learning-empowered robot autonomy and unite them with the assurances provided by formal methods to develop powerful yet safe and trustworthy autonomous systems. Her research draws upon techniques from control theory, robot motion planning, optimization, formal methods and verification, and machine learning.

Previously, she worked on control contraction analysis for nonlinear dynamical systems with the Australian Center for Field Robotics, and also on Hamiltonian and Lagrangian dynamics for platform diving funded by the Australian Institute of Sport.

Awards:

• Robert H. Cannon Jr. Fellowship (2018)
• Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2018)
• Eleanor Sophia Wood Postgraduate Research Traveling Scholarship (2016-2017)
• Arcus Travelling Scholarship (2015-2016)