Lara joined the ORI as a DPhil student in October 2021 as part of the GOALS group, supervised by Prof. Nick Hawes. Her academic interests lie in robot motion planning, scene understanding, and state estimation. She is especially interested in developing risk-aware methods and learnt uncertainty estimations to improve planning in dynamic environments.
Prior to joining the ORI, Lara graduated from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) with an MSc. in "Robotics, Cognition, Intelligence". Over the course of her master's degree, she spent one year at EPFL in Lausanne. First, for an exchange semester and consecutively for her master's thesis supervised by Prof. Aude Billard on 3D scene understanding in dynamic crowded environments. She later collaborated with Prof. Sylvain Calinon as part of the Robot Learning and Interaction Group at the IDIAP research institute on motion planning in complex multi-contact environments. Additionally, during her studies in Munich, Lara worked as a software engineer at the mobile robotics startup Magazino in Munich.
Outside of research, Lara enjoys all sorts of outdoor activities, such as mountain climbing, skiing and sailing, and plays for the University’s volleyball team.
