Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras | Plasma Control and Nonlinear Systems
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), Chennai, India.
My research lies at the intersection of control theory, estimation, and machine learning, with a primary focus on nonlinear and adaptive control. I am particularly interested in reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) methods for nonparametric estimation and adaptive control, with an emphasis on rigorous theoretical analysis and stability guarantees. My research also includes reinforcement learning for feedback control, as well as collaborative work on Koopman operator methods and adaptive dynamic programming.
A central motivation of my work is to connect theoretical developments with applications to complex engineering systems. Much of my research has focused on the control of magnetically confined fusion plasmas, including control methods evaluated experimentally on tokamaks such as DIII-D (USA), KSTAR (South Korea), and TCV (Switzerland). This work includes the application of reinforcement learning to plasma control. Earlier in my career, I worked on modeling and estimation of piezoelectric and smart-material structures for vibration attenuation.
Before joining IIT Madras, I was a Research Scientist and, previously, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Plasma Control Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Lehigh University, USA. I received my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Mathematics from Virginia Tech.