People

Dr. Soumik Sarkar received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State in 2011. He is currently a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and the Director of the Translational AI Center (TrAC) at Iowa State University. He also serves as the Associate Director of the USDA-NIFA-sponsored AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture (AIIRA). Dr. Sarkar's research interests include machine learning and decision and control, with applications to cyber-physical systems such as energy, transportation, design and manufacturing, and agricultural systems. He has co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and has received about $55.4M in research funding during his tenure at Iowa State. He won the ASME DSCD Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award in 2021. Dr. Sarkar is a recipient of the NSF CISE Career Initiation Initiative (CRII) award in 2015, the Young Investigator award from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) in 2017, and the NSF CAREER award in 2019.

Souradeep is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab, which he joined in Spring 2021. He is interested in machine learning, especially unsupervised learning methods and their applications across domains. He has a deep interest in astronomy and has published papers analyzing astronomical data with machine learning methods. His hobbies include singing and reading; his favorite author is Dan Brown, and he is an ardent fan of Sherlock Holmes.

Zahid is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. He joined Dr. Sarkar's lab in Summer 2021. His research interests include human-centric AI in autonomous systems, computer vision and multimodal learning, generative-AI-based multi-agent workflows, and efficient fine-tuning of AI foundation models. He has worked on deep learning and computer vision for intelligent driving applications, and since March 2026 he has been an Agentic AI Research Intern at Corteva Agriscience. His hobbies include cycling, soccer, table tennis, hiking, and photography.

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering. He joined the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory, part of the Translational AI Center at Iowa State University, in Spring 2022. His research focuses on machine learning for multimodal understanding in cyber-agricultural systems, including the deployment of machine learning models in high-throughput agricultural pipelines and the robustness, explainability, and trustworthiness of deployed models. He also enjoys playing chess, reading books, and public speaking.

Qisai is a Ph.D. student at Iowa State University. In Summer 2019, he completed two internships related to robotics and manufacturing. He enjoys working on machine learning and robotics problems.

Nastaran is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering who joined Dr. Sarkar's lab in Fall 2022. Her research interests are in machine learning, deep learning, robotics, and control. She also enjoys reading books, hiking, and watching movies.

Nitesh is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering and a Graduate Research Assistant at Iowa State University. He joined the lab in Summer 2024. His research focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation, robot navigation using large language and vision-language models, and model predictive control (MPC), including the control of dual-arm robots and drones. He is particularly interested in deep reinforcement learning and its applications to improving the efficiency and performance of robotic systems.

Shreyan is a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University. He joined the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory in Fall 2024. He has previously contributed to research projects on image classification, shot boundary detection, and automatic speech recognition, and has deployed a deep learning model for semantic search. His current work focuses on LLM/VLM evaluation, including reasoning-model benchmarking for agriculture, knowledge distillation of speech and EEG models for edge deployment, and agricultural and biomedical AI agents. He also enjoys playing the guitar, computer games, photography, and hiking.

Alloy Das is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University, where he joined the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory in Fall 2025. Before joining Iowa State, he was a Research Assistant in the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. His research focuses on computer vision, multimodal representation learning, and agricultural AI, including multimodal masked autoencoders for plant reconstruction and lighting-robust instance segmentation. His broader interests span autonomous systems, machine perception, and adaptive intelligence.

Lucas is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Iowa State University. He joined the lab in Fall 2025, and his research interests include reinforcement learning and agentic AI.

Henry Kim is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Iowa State University. He joined the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory in Summer 2026. His research interests include robotics, deep reinforcement learning, and computer vision. He also has industry experience in robotics, UAV systems, and deep learning from a previous internship.

Manas is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Iowa State University working on reinforcement learning and computer vision.

Yongyun is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Iowa State University. He joined the lab in Summer 2026, and his research interests include robotics, computer vision, 3D reconstruction, and large language models.

Harshada joined the lab in Fall 2025 as a Ph.D. student on the M.S.-leading-to-Ph.D. track in Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and mechanics.

Tirtho is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University on the M.S.-leading-to-Ph.D. track, concurrently completing a B.S. in Data Science, and an AI researcher at the Translational AI Center (TrAC). He joined the lab in Summer 2024. His research centers on agentic vision-language systems for cyber-agriculture and spans cyber-agricultural systems, biology and health informatics, and FinTech, with work on vision-language models, multi-agent systems, and rigorous LLM/VLM evaluation.