B. (Bahar) Haghighat, PhD

Biography

Bahar Haghighat obtained her PhD in Robotics, Control, and Intelligent Systems in 2018 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and her Master's and Bachelor's degrees respectively in Electrical Engineering/Digital Electronics and Electrical Engineering/Physics (double major) from Sharif University of Technology (SUT) in Tehran, Iran. She has been a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton and a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Radhika Nagpal. Her PhD research focused on mechatronic design and development of an aquatic swarm of miniaturized resource-constrained robotic modules capable of performing self-assembly. Her postdoctoral research focused on mechatronic design, algorithmic development, and modeling of a swarm of vibration sensing robots for infrastructure inspection applications. Bahar Haghighat has been selected as an EECS Rising Star in 2021 (MIT) and in 2019 (UIUC). She is the recipient of EPFL's PhD research award of Gilbert Hausmann for the best PhD thesis in the fields of mechanical engineering, electricity, and physics (2019), EPFL distinction of excellence for a PhD thesis in Robotics, Control, and Intelligent Systems (2018), two Swiss National Science foundation (SNSF) post-doctoral fellowship awards (2017 and 2019), and the third place in EPFL's  My Thesis in 180 Seconds competition (2017).

Research Interests

My research work investigates building novel miniaturized robotic swarms and algorithmic frameworks that enable sensing, surveying, and inspection applications. My research is applied and interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of mechatronics, electronics, embedded systems, embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning, and distributed systems. I envision my research to produce novel surface, aquatic, and aerial miniaturized robot swarms and small-scale intelligent devices that can both serve as tools for basic research and also benefit several commercially promising applications in domains such as inspection of complex structures, environmental monitoring, space exploration, and search-and-rescue robot swarms.