2025 GRASP PhD Award Round-Up

_{^{Text by Jillian Mallon}}

_{^{Caption for featured photo: Mariliza Tzes (right) is pictured with her PhD advisor Prof. George Pappas at Commencement.}}

At the end of each academic year, the University of Pennsylvania and the departments within its School of Engineering and Applied Science recognize their PhD students whose research, academic performance, education, and service have exceeded expectations and made an impact on the Penn community. The GRASP Lab would like to highlight the achievements of the GRASP PhD students who have accepted awards this Spring.

Penn Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching

The Penn Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching Awards are open to all teaching assistants at all schools and departments at Penn. The winners are nominated directly by the undergraduate and graduate students who have been taught by the nominees. This year, 82 nominations for 35 instructors were received, and 10 winners were selected by a faculty committee. Gabe Unger, a Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) PhD student, was selected as one of this year’s 10 winners for his role as a teaching assistant for MEAM 2100: Statics in Fall 2023 and 2024.

Gabe accepted the TA position even though he had not previously taken the class nor had experience with recitations. Despite this potential disadvantage, Gabe learned quickly from the rest of the course’s supportive teaching team and successfully led two weekly recitations, held regular office hours, and provided one-on-one support through the course’s online discussion platform.

Gabe credits his colleagues at the GRASP Lab, especially his PhD advisor Prof. Cynthia Sung,  as well as his other educators at Penn for supporting his successful teaching journey. “I’ve had boundless support from Cynthia and many GRASP faculty and lab mates who helped me whenever I didn’t understand something, and later I found myself using the very same explanations to teach my students. Great teaching is infectious; if you teach three students, and they teach three more, it grows exponentially,” explained Gabe. “I want to especially thank Dr. Robert Carpick, the professor for MEAM 2100, whose endless patience and commitment to learning are unparalleled.”

Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) Outstanding Service Award

Another GRASP PhD student, Keshava Katti, was presented the Outstanding Service Award by the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) department for acting as the president of the ESE PhD Association (EPA) since August 2024. As EPA president, Keshava participated in panel discussions for ESE admitted PhD students and oversaw the ESE Colloquium Series, happy hours, and events funded by the Graduate Student Engineering Group.

“As I have worked within the EPA, I have learned to appreciate the work of event organizers, especially those involved in the preparation beforehand and logistics during an event,” Keshava said. “Throughout the department, we have countless staff, administrators, professors, and students that engage in work to make events on Penn campus happen. Organizing my own events with the EPA has only made me understand and value the contribution of these individuals more throughout all Penn events that I attend.”

Joseph D’16 and Rosaline Wolf Award for Best Dissertation in the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department

GRASP students also received prestigious awards that are specific to their department within SEAS. From the ESE department, Alex Robey and Mariliza Tzes, both advised by Professor George Pappas during their PhD studies, were awarded the Joseph D’16 and Rosaline Wolf Award for Best Dissertation in the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department. 

Alex Robey, who was co-advised by Prof. Pappas as well as Prof. Hamed Hassani, defended his thesis, “Algorithms for Adversarially Robust Deep Learning,” last summer. This research addressed the potential for users to subvert and misuse AI systems by attempting to predict system vulnerabilities and design algorithms to strengthen AI against adversarial misuse. Alex, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, plans to work on similar problems throughout the remainder of his career.

“As I flip through the pages of my thesis, I’m reminded that every piece of work resulted from a team effort,” Alex reminisced. “I’m especially grateful to my advisors George and Hamed, who gave me the profound benefit of their time and energy over the course of six years. I’m also hopeful that this award draws attention to a concern I believe to be tremendously important: we must build AI to be as safe and beneficial as possible for humans.”

Mariliza Tzes also presented her thesis last summer, which was titled, “Mobile Mission Planning in Uncertain Environments.” Her research worked toward allowing robots to operate effectively in unfamiliar environments through the development of planning systems to allow a robot to locate and manipulate items in unknown positions. She also worked to increase the ease of the human-robot interaction portion of the project by exploring how Large Language Models (LLMs) can safely and predictably allow people to describe tasks in plain language. Finally, Mariliza’s thesis presented methods to introduce scalable strategies with Graph Neural Networks to extend this work to multi-robot systems.

Since her graduation, Mariliza has continued her work on leveraging LLMs to make robots more adaptable and capable in real-world, unpredictable scenarios. Most recently, she collaborated with GRASP members on SPINE, an online planner for robotic missions with incomplete mission specifications provided in natural language. This project was recently presented at the Aerial Robots: Learning 2 session of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Mariliza is now working as an applied scientist at Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics. “Now that I’ve moved into industry, I’m looking forward to gaining more hands-on experience with deploying MLLMs and seeing how they perform on real systems,” explained Mariliza, “I hope this will help me better understand where the gaps are and how to make these models even more useful in practice.”

John A. Goff Prize

From the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics department, Victoria “Torrie” Edwards and Elizabeth “Bibit” Bianchini were awarded the John A. Goff Prize. It is presented to MEAM graduate students who were selected by the department’s faculty based on their scholarship, resourcefulness, and leadership. “I am grateful for the recognition of qualities upon which I still strive to improve,” Bibit said. “I have an excellent example in my advisor, Professor Michael Posa, whose combination of technical rigor, patience, and advocacy for his students is inspiring.”

These students followed the footsteps of nine previous GRASP members who have received this award, including Spring 2025 PhD graduate Jake Welde and Prof. M. Ani Hsieh, who is the current GRASP Deputy Director and Torrie Edwards’ PhD advisor. Even more notably, this is the first time the award was given to two GRASP members in the same year, which was delighting news to Bibit and Torrie. Torrie remarked, “I am beyond thrilled to co-win this award with Bibit Bianchini. I admire her leadership, creativity, and passion for advancing the robotics community.” Bibit added, “It’s incredible to share this award with Torrie, who exceedingly deserves recognition of her leadership in all that she does. I’m honored she is a co-recipient, and more honored she is my friend.”

Congratulations to all of the outstanding PhD students at GRASP for another successful year!