Congratulations to Aakash Yadav for successfully defending his Ph.D.

Congratulations to Aakash Yadav, who has successfully defended his dissertation and been hooded in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at the UW-Madison College of Engineering. His research asked a central question in embodied AI and human-robot interaction: does trust look different depending on how people interact with a robot? Aakash examined trust signatures across teleoperated, proximal, and physically coupled interaction modalities, using neurophysiological (EEG, fNIRS, ECG, eye-tracking), behavioral, and subjective measures to understand how factors like fatigue and workload shape trust in embodied AI systems.

His work extended well beyond the dissertation, spanning an internship at the Honda Research Institute, disaster robotics fieldwork, machine learning for real-time, trust-aware robotics, and closed-loop systems for fatigue risk management. The entire NeuroErgonomics Lab is proud of Aakash’s contributions to human-centered robotics and AI system design, and we look forward to seeing where his research goes next.