Rachel Holladay
Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRachel Holladay is an assistant professor and robotics researcher specializing in dexterous, multi-step manipulation for unstructured environments, with a PhD from MIT and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her work bridges contact mechanics, computational geometry, motion planning, control, and task planning to enable robots to reason about forceful interactions, contacts, and deformations during complex tasks like cooking and tidying. She transitioned from a strong CMU undergraduate foundation in computer science and robotics through an extensive MIT research apprenticeship and a postdoc at Penn, and now leads the Autonomous Manipulation lab at UPenn. Rachel contributes to influential teaching resources—having helped refine MIT manipulation course materials—underscoring her commitment to clear technical communication and pedagogy. Colleagues describe her research as both theoretically grounded and hardware-aware, focused on bringing principled algorithms to real-world robot execution.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science and Robotics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University
English
Github Skills (2)
robotics10
documentation10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
RussTedrake/manipulation
Sep 2021 - Nov 2021
Course notes for MIT manipulation class
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:2 reviews, 13 commits, 13 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Rachel primarily contributed to the course notes for an MIT robotic manipulation class. The commits show modifications to the `pick.html`, `pose.html`, and `clutter.html` files, indicating edits to exercises, including adding new exercises, clarifying language, and correcting typos. The user also updated files related to the exercises in the `exercises/pose/` and `exercises/trajectories/` directories. The focus appears to be refining existing content and incorporating new problems within the course materials.
manipulationnotespybulletmitcourse-notes
mcubelab/abb-ros-catkin
Dec 2017 - Aug 2019
Catkinized abb-ros
Contributions:48 commits, 14 PRs, 30 pushes in 1 year 9 months
roboticsrosabb
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.