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How to reach out
I am actively recruiting PhD students for the upcoming year
See below for how to reach out if you are interested in working with me. I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and University of Michigan undergraduate students. I may not be hiring now, but will keep your email for future reference when I am looking to hire for a position so please do not hesitate to reach out.
To make sure I see your email, please make the subject line of your email should follow the format “[Important] Prospective <Position>”. For example, if you are a prospective PhD student, the subject line should be “[Important] Prospective PhD Student”.
Send your email to: apapalia [at ] umich [dot ] edu
Prospective PhD Students
If you are interested in applying to PhDs, read the information below and then reach out with a short email with your CV and a brief paragraph on what you are interested in working on.
I am looking for students who are excited to advance the state of the art in robotics and to tackle difficult fundamental problems in localization, state estimation, and autonomous monitoring of the environment.
Excellence comes from a wide range of past experiences. There is no single path that I expect students to come from, and I strongly encourage applications from all people. I believe the most important characteristics for success are intrinsic motivation, a drive to work on important and challenging problems, and an ability to push through when things aren’t working. It is helpful to have prior programming experience and some technical experience outside of the classroom (e.g., research, internships, work, projects).
A short (and incomplete) list of topics that I am excited about includes:
- Localization and navigation (SLAM) – specifically, I am interested in long-term, low-cost navigation. We want to build smarter robotic systems that intelligently fuse information from a combination of sensors in ways that are more robust and reliable than existing systems.
- Long-term autonomy in challenging environments – developing algorithms that allow robots to operate independently for long periods of time in difficult conditions.
- Field robotics – developing systems that can operate in challenging and remote environments, with a particular focus on underwater systems.
- Adaptive sampling and exploration – developing algorithms that allow robots to make intelligent decisions about where to go and what to measure in order to maximize the information gained (with a focus on environmental monitoring).
- Merging machine learning and model-based robotic systems – finding effective ways to combine data-driven and model-based approaches to leverage the strengths of both.
- Algorithms with provable performance guarantees – building systems that are robust to noise, uncertainty, outliers, and other practical challenges.
- Learned sensor models – developing algorithms that can learn the characteristics of sensors and use this information to improve the performance of robotic systems.
The common thread in all of these topics is that advances in these directions will lead to serious improvements in what robots can do in the wild, allowing for people to apply robotics to solve important problems in the world. My underlying motivation is developing robots that allow us to better understand the natural world, but the technologies we work on are fundamental tools in robotics and are relevant anytime we want to deploy robots in the real world.
Current University of Michigan Undergraduates
I prefer undergraduate researchers who are available for full-time research in the coming summer.
Still interested? Please send:
- A brief email confirming your full-time availability for the coming summer
- Your resume
- Your (unofficial) transcript
- Two short paragraphs explaining why you want to get involved
Postdoctoral Researchers
Send me an email with your CV, three representative publications, and a description of what you are interested in working on.