Current Members

Faculty

Zachary Sunberg

Faculty Member
zachary.sunberg@colorado.edu

Research Interests: POMDPs, Aerospace autonomy, Stochastic games, Applying autonomous decision making under uncertainty in new contexts

Detailed Bio

I’m an Assistant Professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department. I earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University and a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University in the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab. Before joining the University of Colorado faculty, I was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley in the Hybrid Systems Lab. My research is focused on decision making under uncertainty to enable safe and efficient autonomous vehicle operation. My recent research has focused on developing online algorithms for approximately solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and games with continuous or hybrid state, action, and observation spaces. In my free time, I enjoy skiing, trail running (really more like trail slogging), volunteering at my church, and following long Wikipedia rabbit trails.

PhD Students

Ben Kraske

PhD Student
benjamin.kraske@colorado.edu

Research Interests: POMDPs, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Aerospace Autonomy for Safety

Detailed Bio

Hi, I’m Ben. I’m currently pursuing my interest in flight as a PhD student in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. I completed my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at George Fox University, outside Portland, Oregon. My current research interests center around explainable decision making under uncertainty and the development of autonomous systems for safety onboard manned and unmanned aircraft. When I’m not studying or working on research, I like to get outside and bike, rock climb, or play some soccer.

Himanshu Gupta

PhD Student
Himanshu.Gupta@colorado.edu

Detailed Bio

Hey! I’m Himanshu. I am a Ph.D student in the Aerospace Department at CU Boulder. Currently, my research interests include - sequential decision making in partially observable environments that have arbitrary uncertainties, autonomous navigation for vehicles and manipulators among dynamic obstacles, and designing continuous action space online POMDP solvers. Prior to this, I finished my Masters degree in Computer Science from CU Boulder and my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Ropar. In my free time I like to explore the beautiful city of Boulder and its neighboring towns on my bike, play basketball, cook delicious Indian curries, read mystery novels, or just watch animes and TV shows!

Tyler Becker

PhD Student
Tyler.Becker-1@colorado.edu

Detailed Bio

I’m a PhD student at CU Boulder and received my bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey. My research interests lie at the intersection of decision making under uncertainty and game theory. I began my research by investigating POMDP solution methods for finding cost-effective coronavirus testing strategies. Since then, I’ve moved to applying counterfactual regret methods to custody maintenance of adversarial satellites in the space domain awareness field. I’m currently looking into bridging the gap between the deterministic/continuous strategies offered by solutions to differential games and the stochastic/sequential strategies offered by solutions to imperfect information extensive form games.

Zakariya Laouar

PhD Student
Zakariya.Laouar@colorado.edu

Detailed Bio

Hi, I’m Zaki. I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. I received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering also at CU Boulder. My current research revolves around planning and control under uncertainty. I have worked on contingency management of UAS under component failures using MPC and POMDP methods. I am currently working on efficient multi-agent planning for search and rescue. In my free time, I enjoy playing soccer and skiing.

Lisa Ventura

PhD Student
lisa.ventura@colorado.edu

Detailed Bio

Hi, I’m Lisa. I am a PhD student in the Aerospace Engineering Department at CU Boulder. Currently, my research interests include human-autonomy teaming, risk management in partially observable environments with uncertainty, autonomous navigation to minimize risk, and optimizing human trust of collaborative autonomous systems. Prior to this, I earned a masters degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. I’m co-advised by Allie Hayman in the Bioastronautics focus area and work on trust modeling and prediction.

Mark Boyer

PhD Student
mark.boyer@colorado.edu

Detailed Bio

Hi I’m Mark! I’m currently a PhD student in aerospace engineering at CU Boulder. I received my Bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering from the US Air Force Academy and my Master’s in the same from MIT. My research will hopefully focus upon better understanding the critical attributes and consequences of explainability in human-autonomy teaming in high-criticality environments. I am a test pilot in the Air Force with experience mostly in the F-35 and T-38, but have been lucky enough to fly over 20 different types of aircraft over 10 years of flying. Outside of work, I love getting outdoors hiking, camping, mountain biking, skiing, or playing golf.

Mel Krusniak

PhD Student
mel.krusniak@vanderbilt.edu

Detailed Bio

I’m a third-year PhD student at Vanderbilt University, working with ADCL over the summer of 2025 to develop a Julia framework for working with fully continuous, differentiable partially observable multiagent scenarios. At my home lab - the Vanderbilt Mathematical Programming and Intelligent Robotics Lab (VAMPIR) - I build algorithms for imperfect information games in robotics, targeting partially competitive, partially cooperative applications. In the past / on the side, I’ve worked with UAVs for conservation, computer vision in surgical robotics, and machine learning for road maintenance monitoring. I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Yale University in 2022. In my spare time, I enjoy board games and writing, and I’m an amateur sewist.