I’m a final-year PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Melkior Ornik at the LEADCAT group.
I am broadly interested in problems in control, learning and optimization. My research currently focuses on optimal control and resilience for systems whose dynamics are affected by system faults or adversaries. In this area, I am interested in (and have worked on) resilience quantification and resilient design for nonlinear systems and networks, potentially operating in a hostile environment.
My research combines tools from nonlinear control, optimal control and optimization, and is motivated by considerations of scalability and computational efficiency with underlying theoretical rigor. See my Research page for more details. In the near future, I will continue to work on designing controllers for such systems suffering adversarial effects, and am especially interested in learning-based solutions to this problem.
Some of my other work has involved multi-agent reinforcement learning and the use of learning to deceive adversaries in stochastic environments.
I received the Joan and Lalit Bahl Fellowship for two years between 2024 and 2026, and was a finalist of the IFAC Young Author Award in 2025. I received my MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where I worked with Peter Seiler on analyzing the effect of varying step sizes on the convergence and noise amplification of gradient descent.
You can find my CV here, and my Google Scholar page here.
Contact: 360 Coordinated Science Laboratory, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Email: ramp3 [at] illinois [dot] edu
Education
Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering (Current)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.
Advisor: Melkior Ornik
Thesis: Resource-Aware System Design and Resilience QuantificationM.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2023
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Advisor: Peter SeilerB.Tech Electronics and Communication Engineering, 2021
PES University, Bengaluru, India.
Advisors: Rajini Makam and Koshy George
Capstone Project: Adaptive Iterative Learning Control
News
May 4, 2026 — A new white paper on “A Vision for STEM Higher Education in the Face of AI” is now available on EdArXiv. We present an overarching vision for the future of bachelor’s degrees, classroom teaching and learning, research processes as well as the broader landscape of universities, given the rapid technological development in generative AI.
April 26, 2026 — I was at the 12th Midwest Workshop on Control and Game Theory this weekend, where I presented a poster on our recent submission “Energetic Resilience under Temporal Logic Specifications”.
April 2, 2026 — Submitted three papers; see the Publications section for more information.
March 25, 2026 — I passed my preliminary examination today, and am in the final stage of my PhD!
February 25, 2026 — We successfully conducted the 2026 CSL Student Conference, where I was a chair for the Robotics and Control Session.
January 29, 2026 — I will be a Graduate Teaching Assistant for AE 498 ARO: Advanced Review of Basic Mathematics this semester.
January 6, 2026 — Our paper “Approximate Energetic Resilience of Nonlinear Systems under Partial Loss of Control Authority” has been accepted as a brief paper in Automatica!
December 13, 2025 — I was at the 64th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) this week, presenting our paper “Mode-Prefix-Based Control of Switched Linear Systems with Applications to Fault Tolerance”.
October 10, 2025 — I will be co-chairing the Robotics and Control session at the 2026 CSL Student Conference.
October 9, 2025 — I was at the 5th Modeling, Estimation and Control Conference (MECC) this week, presenting our paper “Analysis of the Unscented Transform Controller for Systems with Bounded Nonlinearities”.
September 16, 2025 — Submitted a paper “Online Learning of Deceptive Policies under Intermittent Observation”. This paper uses Theory of Mind (ToM) to inform online reinforcement learning (RL), and thus design deceptive policies for an agent in the setting of supervisory control.
September 8, 2025 — Submitted a new paper “Ignore Drift, Embrace Simplicity: Constrained Nonlinear Control through Driftless Approximation”. This paper presents a novel method to control input-constrained nonlinear systems using optimal controllers for driftless systems, applied over successively shorter horizons.