Personal

This page is the less formal side of the website. It is where I let the site breathe a little.

Bio (Professional version)

Sarmad Mehrdad recently completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, advised by Prof. Ludovic Righetti. His research focuses on inverse reinforcement learning, optimal control, and human motion understanding, with applications in human-robot interaction, learning from demonstration, and embodied intelligence.

Before joining NYU, he earned his M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University in 2019, where he developed an educational platform for the design, control, and simulation of mobile wheeled robots. He completed his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at K. N. Toosi University of Technology in Tehran in 2015, with work on AI-assisted boundary detection of soft-tissue tumors.

Across his graduate years, his work has ranged from developing learning and control frameworks for understanding dynamic human motion to running human-subject experiments with multimodal sensing. His broader research interests include interpretable robot learning, motion modeling, human-centered robotics, and data-efficient learning.

Long term, he hopes to pursue an academic career and build embodied robotic systems that can learn from humans while remaining transparent, grounded, and mathematically principled.

Bio (Unconventional version)

I got my B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering in 2015 from K. N. Toosi University in my hometown, Tehran. I moved to the U.S. in December 2016 to start my M.Sc. at Clarkson University in upstate New York. Astonishing scenery, lovely people, excruciatingly cold.

I finished that chapter in 2019 and started my Ph.D. at NYU in 2020. Somewhere along the way, I changed labs after four years. Do not ask. It was a turbulent roller-coaster of stories worthy of a book one day.

I eventually landed in Ludovic’s lab and moved deeper into the research direction that feels most like me. During these years, I learned a lot, and not only academically.

  • I learned how to conduct research and think critically. Work in progress.
  • I learned how to teach and communicate with a very wide range of students, from K-12 to graduate school.
  • I learned how to advise students, delegate work, resolve conflict, and be skeptical enough to question my own assumptions.
  • I learned how to brainstorm, collaborate, and respect ideas other than mine.
  • I learned how to navigate 20 plus tabs open on my browser.
  • I learned I have severe ADHD. Thanks, dad. That explained the 20 plus tabs.
  • I learned a lot about how advising should work and how it should not. In all honesty, if it were not for Ludovic, I would not have seen the healthier side of that equation nearly as clearly. If you are reading this, Ludovic, I do not have the words to thank you.

Above all, I think I learned how to learn.

From mistakes or job-well-dones, failures or successes, sleepless days or days off. From not knowing why my code does not work, or for that matter why it does work. Everything in my Ph.D. had something to teach me, and looking back, I have changed a lot since the day I started this path.

At some point in the past decade, I realized that my deepest professional ambition is to become a professor one day. That is still the direction I care about most. Right now my eyes are set on the next chapter, ideally a postdoctoral position where I can keep sharpening my thinking in robot learning and control and get a little closer to becoming the cool prof.

Get to know me

  • Born in 1991, so among the latest batches of Millennials.
  • Mom’s a surgeon/gynecologist. Dad’s a retired (yet big-shot) engineer. So yeah, raised by nerds.
  • Married to my best friend, Shafagh. We’ve known each other for 14 years now!!
  • Kind of an old soul. Like, I listen to John Denver and Nat King Cole — not to mention Vivaldi old.
  • Guitar player for, I guess, 20 years — and a huge (and obnoxious) musicophile. My favorite genres are metal, rock, and classical, but good music is beyond any conventional categorization. See? Obnoxious.
  • Fundamentally extroverted. I’d love nothing more than making new friends and having great conversations.
  • The shows I love to watch are stand up comedies, documentaries, political satire, and cooking shows. Oh and also those rug cleanings, and restoration videos! I find them deeply therapeutic.
  • Things I won’t think twice before spending money on: Concerts, Colognes, Cookware !!

Unpopular opinions

  • Papers are the currency of academia – But look out for the get-rich-quick schemes !!
  • Taking breaks are productive. Have a lazy day every once in a while.
  • PhD (and academia in general) is a part of life, not the entire thing.
  • If you’re a professor, your student should never be afraid of showing you bad results.
  • Open-sourcing has a positive effect on your work’s productivity.
  • Being a professor is far beyond having a stellar CV. You can have all the publications and awards there are, but without respect, understanding, and humility, you’ll never make an impact.
  • Saying “I don’t know” takes courage.