I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University working with Professor Radhika Nagpal at the SSR lab to implement embedded swarms in self-adaptable structures. I obtained my Robotics and Autonomous Systems PhD in 2022, which is part of the FARSCOPE CDT program, a collaborative CDT delivered jointly by the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England through their partnership, the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. I was working at the Hauert Lab, supervised by Professor Sabine Hauert and Dr Paul O’Dowd.
My PhD focused on building expressive swarms to enhance human-swarm interaction (HSI). The aim was to be able to take swarm systems out of the lab to be used by members of the public in social settings. For that, I built the MOSAIX system as part of my PhD research, which is a swarm of 100 screens-on-wheels robots called Tiles. Check out MOSAIX page to see the various times people interacted with MOSAIX!
I obtained my Master’s degree is Robotics from the the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England in 2019. My dissertation, Robotic Canvas, focused on exploring 6 different interaction modes with Kilobots that enable a human to paint with a swarm of 220 robots.
Before joining my Master’s degree, I was part of the Digital Technology Leadership Program at GE (General Electric) from 2016 to 2018 where I rotated between GE businesses (GE Digital, GE Power and GE Oil & Gas) as a Product Owner and a Software Engineer on projects such as Brilliant Factories and Digital Twins in 3 different countries (UAE, UK and Saudi Arabia).
I received my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering (minoring in Music Technology) with High Honours from the American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2016. I went on a summer study abroad semester in University of California, Berkeley in 2013. I also interned in Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in 2013 (Microsystems Research Intern) and 2014 (Human-Robot Interaction Research Intern).
Merihan Alhafnawi 