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Current Lab Members

Faculty & Staff

J. Christian Gerdes Lab Director / Car-Lord Chris Gerdes is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University and Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). His laboratory studies how cars move, how humans drive...... more	Erina Dubois Lab Manager/Chief of Staff Erina DuBois is the Dynamic Design Lab Manager under Professor Chris Gerdes. She was previously the lab manager for the Communication Between Humans & Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab under Professor...... more
Lene Harbott Chief Ford Anglia Advocate and Lab Lollipop Lady Lene's research focuses on investigating the neural correlates of safe driving performance, and the changes in brain activity that occur when interacting with automated vehicle safety systems.

Students

Alaisha Alexander Alaisha Alexander is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She obtained a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of...... more	Dana Paz Dana is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering....... more
Gene Lewis Air Horn Impersonator Autonomous vehicles, almost by definition, hold promise to replace the driver in an increasing number of scenarios. However, this dream brings with it an enormous set of complexities; fundamentally, the...... more	John Kegelman Lab Wizard Race car drivers show exceptional skill in repeatedly pushing their cars to the limits given the extraordinary and highly dynamic environments experienced during racing. John Kegelman, Mechanical...... more
John P Alsterda Firepower Enhancement Program Director State of the art automated vehicles can safely navigate planned paths which do not exceed limitations imposed by friction and other physical properties. Planning trustworthy paths, however, is challenging...... more	John Subosits Lab Coach John Subosits, Mechanical Engineering graduate student, works to model the stability and performance limits of vehicles more aggressively and accurately. He started by improving the ability of autonomous...... more
John Talbot Lab Gentleman Human drivers will be present on roadways for many years to come, even as fully autonomous vehicles become more prevalent. The insights garnered from research on keeping autonomous vehicles safe are...... more	Jonathan Goh PhDrift Jon develops algorithms for handling extreme situations; this research is currently manifest as MARTY, the world's first & only autonomous electric drifting DeLorean.
Matt Brown Pun-tificator/Hype Man As autonomous cars move on to the open road, they will increasingly encounter situations involving high lateral acceleration and limited friction. It is important that we have control strategies that can...... more	Nathan Spielberg Head Chef In order to make autonomous vehicles safe, they must be able to learn and adapt to a variety of operating conditions. Nathan is interested in using learning to improve the vehicle’s control capabilities.
Sarah Thornton Mario-Kart Strategist Sarah Thornton currently pursues her doctoral degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. She obtained her Sc.M. degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in...... more	Tushar Goel Trailer Whisperer Tushar's research is focused on the dynamics of drifting and how they apply in safety systems for emergencies. He is incorporating the use of brakes into the current drift controllers using MARTY
Vincent Laurense Stroopwafel Ambassador Vincent is investigating how autonomous cars can use all locally available tire-road friction, and match the vehicle control skills of the best human race car drivers in the world	Vivian Zhang Lab Enthusiast Vivian is examining the effect of modelling choices on vehicle performance when leveraging a model predictive control framework.

Post-Docs

Nitin Kapania