Robotics Alumni Award Seminar
Speaker: Emma Reznick, PhD
Research Scientist, Fauna Robotics

Title: Robotics is inherently multidisciplinary, and you should be too!
Date: Friday, October 16, 2026
Time: 3:00 - 4:15pm ET
Location: FRB 2300 with Zoom
Zoom Link: https://myumi.ch/e7Gdj
Meeting ID: 971 8312 3952
Passcode: 711990

Abstract:
The robot that navigates a warehouse or assists in surgery is never the work of one discipline. It fuses mechanics, control theory, vision, machine learning, embedded firmware, and domain-specific knowledge in real time where a bug can destroy the robot or hurt someone near it. The nastiest bugs never sit inside a single discipline; they hide in the seams between them. A motion policy that looks wrong turns out to be an incorrect friction model.

This talk walks through a series of real failures and the attempts to fix each one. Every bug started in one domain and was solved in another, and each one is a case for pairing depth with breadth.

Speaker Bio:
Emma Reznick is a Research Scientist with Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company. Her work focuses on the development of novel robotic platforms and narrowing the sim-to-real gap through modeling and hardware characterization. She got her bachelors in Biochemistry and Electrical Engineering from Colorado College, and then pursued her PhD with Dr. Robert Gregg at the University of Texas at Dallas (MS, Biomedical Engineering) and the University of Michigan (PhD Robotics). She now lives in New York City and gets to work with robots every day.