About Me
Coca-Cola Foundation Early Career Professor & Assistant Professor
I am a Coca-Cola Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, with a joint appointment with the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME).
I am the Director of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Laboratory (TASL) and a core faculty member in the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM).
Before joining Georgia Tech, I received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where I worked with Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka, followed by a Postdoctoral Scholar appointment at Stanford University, where I worked with Prof. Mykel J. Kochenderfer. I also served as an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Attention! I am actively looking for multiple highly motivated Ph.D. students (fully funded, starting in Spring 2027 and Fall 2027), master students, undergraduate students, and research interns to join my lab. If you are interested, please follow the application instructions HERE. Please feel free to send me an email if any questions.
Research Interest
My research interest lies in the intersection of robotics, trustworthy AI & ML, reinforcement learning, control, optimization, and computer vision and their applications to intelligent autonomous systems (e.g., mobile robots, humanoids, autonomous vehicles, drones, cyber-physical systems). I am particularly interested in human-robot interactions and multi-agent systems.
Please refer to my lab website for more details about our recent research!
I am open to research discussion and collaboration, please feel free to get in touch!
Join My Lab
I am currently seeking multiple highly motivated talents to join my laboratory as Ph.D. students (fully funded), master's students, undergraduate students, or onsite/remote research interns, visiting scholars, or postdoctoral scholars. If you are interested in working with me, please check my lab website for application instructions.
Prospective students must also submit an application for a certain program on the Georgia Tech official website before the corresponding deadline. If you are applying for a Ph.D. program in Robotics or Machine Learning, please indicate Prof. Jiachen Li as your prospective advisor in the Georgia Tech official application form and Statement of Purpose.
Research
The ultimate goal of my research is to enable trustworthy, interactive, and human-centered autonomous embodied agents that can perceive, understand, and reason about the physical world; safely interact and collaborate with humans; and efficiently coordinate with other intelligent agents so that they can benefit society in daily lives. To accomplish this goal, I have been pursuing interdisciplinary research that develops fundamental theories and practical algorithms grounded in robotics, machine learning, reinforcement learning, computer vision, control theory, and optimization, which are validated on various robotic hardware platforms such as humanoid mobile manipulators, quadrupeds, autonomous vehicles, manipulators, and drones.
Please check my lab website for my latest featured research topics!
Publications