Hi! My name is Kyle Morgenstein and I am a fourth year PhD student in the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin advised by Luis Sentis. I am also a researcher at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute on the Ultra-Mobility Vehicles (UMV) Reinforcement Learning (RL) team advised by Gabe Nelson and Farbod Farshidian. 

I'm excited about human-centered design for social robots and the potential for robots to radically improve the lives of humans. My work seeks to answer questions in reinforcement and representation learning surrounding emergent social behaviors for robots that work near and interact with people. More specifically, I employ learning-based sensor fusion techniques to give robots the ability to "feel" contacts to proactively reason about external stimuli and exploit environmental dynamics. 

Previously I graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020 with degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Earth Atmospheric & Planetary Science, where I won the Christopher Goetze Award for undergraduate research. My previous research was primarily in computer vision and controls at NASA JPL, Boeing, and MIT Lincoln Labs.

When I'm not playing with robots, I am an an avid hiker, rower, and tinkerer. I also enjoy cooking, drawing, lifting weights, chocolate ice cream (edit: I am now lactose intolerant), and Club Penguin.