People

The people of the GRaDS Lab at NJIT.

Principal Investigator

Dr. Adeel Akhtar
Principal Investigator · Assistant Professor, MIE
Directs the GRaDS Lab. Research in mobile and aerial robotics, nonlinear systems, and geometric & hybrid control. Previously postdoc at UC Santa Cruz, KAUST, University of Toronto, and York University. PhD (Mechanical & Mechatronics Eng.) and MASc (ECE), University of Waterloo; BE (Mechatronics), NUST.

PhD Students

Hamza Mahmood
PhD Candidate, Mechanical Engineering
Geometric control of stochastic dynamical systems, studied through differential geometry. MSc in Mathematics (LUMS); BE in Electrical Engineering (NUST).
Hamza Tariq
PhD Candidate, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering
Nonlinear and optimization-based control for safety-critical autonomous systems — feedback linearization, control barrier functions, and decentralized multi-robot coordination. BE (Mechatronics) and MS in Electrical Engineering (Control), NUST.

Undergraduate Students

Kiran Aman
Undergraduate Researcher, Mechanical Engineering
Works on robotic mechanism design, machining, and digital fabrication — including a coaxial 3-RRR spherical parallel manipulator (NJIT URI seed-grant finalist).