Summary
Thai Duong is a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University's Kavraki Lab specializing in task and motion planning, building on a PhD in robotics from UC San Diego where he developed learning-based environment and dynamics representations for autonomous navigation. He combines academic rigor with industry experience—having spent three years as a software engineer at Microsoft and an advanced robotics internship at Amazon—bringing a pragmatic, production-aware approach to robot planning and control. His research blends learning, planning, and control, and he has collaborated with professors across robotics, control, and applied math, signaling strong interdisciplinary fluency. Based in Houston with eight years of professional experience, he is comfortable moving ideas from theoretical development to real-world systems and benchmarks. Less obvious: he pairs deep algorithmic work with prior systems-level debugging experience from performance and concurrency projects at Microsoft, which helps him bridge simulation and deployment challenges.
7 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
University of California, San Diego
Master of Science (M.Sc.), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 4.0, Master of Science (M.Sc.), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 4.0 at Oregon State University
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Electronics and Telecommunications, 8.8/10, Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Electronics and Telecommunications, 8.8/10 at Hanoi University of Technology