Alexandra (Alli) Nilles, PhD
She/Her/Hers, Assistant Professor
Office
Location
KB 403D
Hours
My office hours are
2-4pm Wednesdays and Thursdays
or on Zoom, scheduled here: https://calendly.com/nillesa2-wwu/office-hours
Website
https://alli.nilles.info/About
I am a roboticist! When not busy wrangling robots, I enjoy being outside (hiking, camping, biking), joyful movement (roller skating, dance), and being inside (reading sci-fi, gaming, cooking).
Research Interests:
sustainable robotics / robotics for climate, planning algorithms, distributed AI, embodied intelligence, automated robot design, formal methods in robotics, human-robot interfaces and programming languages
Educational & Professional Experience
I have been an Assistant Professor at WWU since 2024. My postdoc was in Prof. Kirstin Petersen's Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab at Cornell from 2021-2024. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020, advised by Prof. Steven LaValle. While at UIUC, I interned at Sprite Robotics and helped develop a robotic mouse toy for cats, supported by an NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant. Before that, I studied Engineering Physics at the Colorado School of Mines. My research has been published at venues including the Workshop for Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics and the International Journal of Robotics Research, and in 2023 I was recognized as a Cyber-Physical Systems Rising Star and a Microsoft Future Leader in Robotics and AI.
Recent Publications:
See Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3AvC70UAAAAJ&hl=en) for an up-to-date list of my scholarly publications.