Education
- 08/06 – 08/11 William Marsh Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
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Doctor of Philosophy program in Computer Science, degree awarded in December 2011. Thesis: Task and Motion Planning for Mobile Manipulators.
Part of the Physical and Biological Computing Group (research in robot motion planning, mobile manipulation). Master of Science degree in Computer Science, November 2008. Thesis: Kinodynamic Motion Planning for High-dimensional Physical Systems. - 09/03 – 05/06 Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
- Bachelor of Science program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, awarded degree in June 2006. Thesis: A Search Engine for Mathematical Formulae.
- 08/05 – 12/05 William Marsh Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
- Exchange student for one semester, studied Computer Science.
- 09/99 – 06/03 Moise Nicoara National College, Arad, Romania
- Concentrated on Mathematics, Sciences and English.
Work Experience
- 12/16 – present Software Engineer, Waymo, Mountain View, California, USA
- 11/13 – 12/16 Software Engineer, Google [x], Mountain View, California, USA
- 10/11 – 08/13 Research Scientist, Willow Garage, Menlo Park, California, USA
- Research and Development in motion planning and manipulation, developed MoveIt!, continued work on OMPL.
- 06/09 – 08/09 Research Intern, Willow Garage, Menlo Park, California, USA
- Developed motion planning software for the PR2 (Personal Robots Program), in particular focusing on manipulation.
- 06/08 – 09/08 Research Intern, Willow Garage, Menlo Park, California, USA
- Developed motion planning software for the PR2 (Personal Robots Program). Started OMPL.
- 06/06 – 08/06 Software Developer intern, Design Science, Long Beach, California, USA
- Converted LaTeX documents into XHTML + Presentation MathML, using LaTeXML.The goal was to produce input data for a search engine.
- 06/05 – 07/05 Guest Researcher at National Institute of Standards and Technology, Washington DC, USA
- Worked on Digital Library of Mathematical Functions Project; required Perl programming, working with LaTeX, XML.
- 09/03 – 05/05 Teaching Assistant for Computer Science, Jacobs University, Germany
- Tutored, graded homeworks and exams for General Computer Science course.
- 02/02 – 08/03 SC Security Prod SRL, Arad, Romania
- Developed the software for a home security monitoring system based on GSM.
Honors, Awards
IEEE RAS Early Career Award
Awarded in 2016, for contributions to open source software for robot motion planning.
Open Source Software World Challenge Grand Prize
At the 2012 edition of the competition, with the OMPL project.
Best Poster Design Award
Corporate Affiliates Meeting, Rice University, 2009.
Best Technical Contribution Award
Corporate Affiliates Meeting, Rice University, 2008.
Graduate Fellowship
PhD studies in Computer Science, Rice University, 2006.
International Computer Science contests
- The Mathematical Contest in Modeling, 2005 (was awarded honourable mention).
- International 24 hour Programming contest, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary, 2004.
- Associated Computing Machinery (ACM), Lund, Sweden, 2003.
Member of president's list
During undergraduate studies (2003 - 2006).
Prizes at national contests (in Romania)
Computer Science and Mathematics (2000 - 2003).
Soft skills
Computer Skills:
- Programming in C/C++, Perl, Matlab.
- Experience with database programming, web services, socket programming, distributed and shared memory parallel programming.
- Basic knowledge of Python, Java, PHP, HTML.
Languages:
- Romanian: mother tongue
- English: fluent in written and spoken
- French: working knowledge