2025
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July 2025: Started my tenure-track journey as an Assistant Professor at Rice Mechanical Engineering and Rice Neuroengineering Initiative.
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June 2025: Completed Postdoctoral Research at Georgia Institute of Technology, see my LinkedIn post about it here.
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May 2025: Attended Rehabweek 2025 in Chicago; presented two projects: an ICORR publication (Challenge-Based Adaptation of Exoskeleton Assistance and Gamified Biofeedback Enables Automated Gait Rehabilitation) and a late-breaking report on hip exoskeleton assistance effects on hemiparetic gait.
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April 2025: Two graduate students have accepted offers to pursue PhDs with the Ghonasgi lab at Rice University, see details here.
​2024
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November 2024: Paper published! Crucial hurdles to achieving human-robot harmony, an opinion piece in Science Robotics. Co-authors: Taylor Higgins, Meghan E. Huber, Marcia K. O'Malley.
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August 2025: The Ghonasgi lab at Rice University received a brand new Harmony Exoskeleton!
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July 2024: Announcing the Ghonasgi lab at Rice University, starting Fall 2025! Dr. Ghonasgi will be joining Rice as an Assistant Professor in July 2025.
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​May 2024: Abstract accepted for poster presentation at the American Society of Biomechanics 2024 meeting in Wisconsin, Madison. Looking forward to a cheese curd crawl!
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March 21, 2024: BioRob 2024 workshop accepted! Come join us for our half-day workshop on "Building Responsive Body-Machine Interfaces with Biosignals and Robotic Exoskeletons". Congratulations to all the organizers: Ava Chen, Lauren Winterbottom, Aaron Young, and Matei Ciocarlie.
​2023
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Dec 1, 2023: Invited to present my dissertation research, "Practice Makes Perfect: Leveraging Exoskeleton Interactions To Elucidate the Motor Learning Process" at ATL Neuromechanics, a collaborative seminar series by Georgia Tech and Emory University.
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Nov 3rd, 2023: Invited to present a lightning talk (5 min) on my doctoral research. I won an award for best lightning talk from the College of Engineering! Here's us celebrating our awards.
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October 1 - 5th, 2023: Attended IROS 2023 in Detroit. Had a great time meeting old and new friends and presented my last (?) UT Austin affiliated conference paper! #hookem
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September 7, 2023: Began my postdoctoral fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology's EPIC lab working on control of intelligent wearable robots for assistance and rehabilitation.
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August 2, 2023: Presented a summary of my Ph.D. research at a lab meeting for the Robotics and Rehabilitation (ROAR) lab at Columbia University. I worked on my M.S. thesis as a part of this lab from 2016 - 2018!
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July 14, 2023: I successfully defended my PhD dissertation! The abstract and video are at this link: Practice Makes Perfect: Leveraging Exoskeleton Interactions To Elucidate The Motor Learning Process.
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June 26, 2023: Our paper titled Kinematic coordinations capture learning during human–exoskeleton interaction has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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June 21, 2023: First-author paper accepted for presentation at IROS 2023! Reach out if you're going to be in Detroit this Fall and would like to meet at the conference.
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April 25, 2023: Invited to present my research at CalTech as part of their Young Investigators Lecture Series in Engineering and Applied Science. Here's a short blog post about the talk! Here's the talk webpage.
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March 27, 2023: Invited to present my research at NYU's ECE department. The talk was titled Engineering Intelligent Physical Human-Robot Interactions.
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March 9, 2023: Invited to present my research at Georgia Tech's EPIC lab.
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February 25, 2023: Volunteered to help organize and run activities for #UTGirlDay #GirlDay2023 as part of Texas Robotics. Check out the video!
​2022
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Oct. 22 - 27, 2022: Attended a most memorable IROS 2022 in Kyoto, presenting my research in the Computational advances in HRI session 2, and some video games I developed at the Ergonomics for HRI workshop.
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Oct. 6 - 7, 2022: Had an excellent experience attending the Rising Stars in ME 2022 workshop at Stanford. Read about it here.
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September 2022: Accepted to the Rising Stars in ME 2022 workshop to be held at Stanford university in October 2022.
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August - Nov. 2022: Part-time Student Researcher position at Meta Reality Labs (previously Oculus).
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July 2022: Paper titled "Quantifying Changes in Kinematic Behavior of A Human-Exoskeleton Interactive System" accepted for presentation at IROS 2022.
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May - August 2022: Summer position at Meta Reality Labs (previously Oculus) as a Research Scientist Intern working on haptic rendering for virtual reality.
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May 16, 2022: Defended dissertation proposal and qualified to be a Ph.D. candidate in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin.
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April 15, 2022: My best friend and I got married in India!
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February 2022: Awarded the University Graduate Continuing Fellowship by the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin for the 2022 - 2023 academic year.
​2021
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September 2021: Co-chaired the Medical Robots and Systems I session at IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021).
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September 2021: Presented "Capturing Skill State in Curriculum Learning for Human Skill Acquisition" at IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021).
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June 2021: "Capturing Skill State in Curriculum Learning for Human Skill Acquisition" accepted for presentation at IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021).
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May 2021: Paper accepted, "An Actuated Indented for Characterization of Soft Tissue Towards Human-Centered Design", IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) 2021.
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May 2021: Paper accepted, "A Method for the Analysis of Physical Human-Robot Interaction", IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) 2021.
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February 2021: Paper accepted, "Design and Validation of a Novel Exoskeleton Hand Interface: The Eminence Grip", to be presented at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2021.
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February 2021: Published "A Modular Design for Distributed Measurement of Human–Robot Interaction Forces in Wearable Devices" in Sensors 2021, Special Issue Advances in Design and Integration of Wearable Sensors for Ergonomics.
​2020
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October 2020: Presented "Design and Validation of a Sensorized Physical Human-Robot Interface for Distributed Force Measurement" at IROS 2020 Workshop (EHRC).
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October 2020: Presented "Leveraging Reinforcement learning for Human Motor Skill Acquisition" at IROS 2020 Workshop on Social AI for HRI of Human-care Service Robots.
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October 2020: Presented "Leveraging Reinforcement learning for Human Motor Skill Acquisition" at Human Friendly Robotics (HFR) 2020.
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March 2020: "A Novel Inverse Kinematics Method for Upper-Limb Exoskeleton under Joint Coordination Constraints" accepted for publication at IEEE IROS 2020.
Older
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May 2019: "Estimating the Effect of Robotic Intervention on Elbow Joint Motion" accepted for publication at IEEE RO-MAN 2019; presented Oct 2019.
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August 2018: Started as a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. at UT Austin
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May - August 2018: Research Scientist Intern at Intel, Chandler AZ
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January 2018: Graduated from Columbia University with a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering focusing in Robotics. Check out some of my projects there.