Eugene Valassakis
Senior Research Engineer at Synthesia
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolEugene Valassakis is a Senior Research Engineer and PhD candidate at Imperial College London specializing in robot learning, sim-to-real transfer, and vision-driven imitation learning for manipulation. With nine years of experience spanning research internships at Niantic and Dyson to production roles at Synthesia, he bridges cutting-edge research and deployed systems—his Niantic work led to a shipped real-time hand-mesh tracking feature. He holds dual MSc degrees (Computer Science, Imperial; Machine Learning, UCL) and a BSc in Physics, bringing strong interdisciplinary foundations from optics and physics to ML and robotics. Comfortable across full-stack development, mobile apps, and deep learning research, he combines practical engineering (React Native, production ML) with academic rigor in thesis-driven sim-to-real research. Notably, his background includes hands-on experimental work (graphene research at UC Berkeley), reflecting a rare blend of wet-lab precision and software-first system-building.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Physics, Physics at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Science Physics, Bachelor of Science Physics at University of St AndrewsDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Robot Learning, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Robot Learning at Imperial College LondonUniversity College London
English, French, Greek
Github Skills (76)
robotics9
siggraph9
webots9
synthetic9
gazebosim9
robot9
gazebo-simulator9
blender9
q-learning8
pybullet8
feature-matching8
3d-reconstruction8
autonomous-robots8
synthetic-data8
rendering8
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
eugval/sim2real_dynamics_simulation
Mar 2020 - Dec 2020
Contributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 9 pushes in 8 months
UCLIntroDLGrp/DeepArt
Nov 2017 - Feb 2018
Contributions:8 PRs, 110 pushes, 6 branches in 2 months
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