Purdue University

Ph.D. Positions in Robot Learning at Purdue CS

The Cognitive Robot Autonomy and Learning (CoRAL) Lab (corallab.net) in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University (purdue.edu), led by Prof. Ahmed Qureshi (qureshiahmed.github.io), is seeking multiple Ph.D. students starting Fall 2026 in the area of physics-informed robot learning for planning and control. We aim to build robot learning methods that leverage PDEs and numerical principles to learn with minimal supervision and without extensive trial-and-error. Our applications include robot manipulation, full-body humanoid planning and control, deformable object manipulation, and reactive decision-making in dynamic environments.

[1] R. Ni and A. H. Qureshi, NTFields: Neural Time Fields for Physics-Informed Robot Motion Planning, ICLR 2023. [SPOTLIGHT] [2] R. Ni, Z. Pan, and A. H. Qureshi, Physics-informed Temporal Difference Metric Learning for Robot Motion Planning, ICLR 2025. [3] Y. Liu, R. Ni, and A. H. Qureshi, Physics-informed Neural Mapping and Motion Planning in Unknown Environments, IEEE Transactions on Robotics 2025. [4] V. Giammarino, R. Ni, and A. H. Qureshi, Physics-informed Value Learner for Scalable Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning, NeurIPS 2025.

Interested candidates must apply through the Purdue CS Graduate Admission Portal for the Fall 2026 term and mention Prof. Ahmed Qureshi as a preferred advisor.

– Ahmed. H. Qureshi Assistant Professor of Computer Science Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN Email: ahqureshi@purdue.edu Tel:(765)-496-3071 Web: qureshiahmed.github.io