I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Rice University, working under the supervision of Lydia Kavraki and Anastasios Kyrillidis. I am honored to have received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2019 to start my doctoral studies. I was borned in Cartagena and raised in Barranquilla (Colombia) where I completed my high-school education. In 2006 I moved to Bogota where I was lucky enough to finish my undergraduate and graduate studies in Electronic Engineering with a special emphasis on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. In 2011 I started a position in Accelogic LLC in Sunrise Florida as R&D Engineer in the field of High Performance Computing, where I spent approximately a year. A few years later I had the chance to teach and do research at Universidad Santo Tomas and Universidad de los Andes where I was introduced to the world of robotics. In 2017 I got married.

Currently, I am interested in understanding how to plan safe motions for robots in unstructured environments. My goal is to provide robots with the capabilities of autonomously deciding and acting in environments that may have noisy or incomplete information. To this end, I have explored the use of optimization and data-driven models that enable the robots to perform complicated tasks safely and reliably.