Instructors
Mohan Rajesh Elara
Associate Professor, EPD
SUTD
Dr Mohan is currently a Provost Chair Professor with the Engineering Product Development pillar at Singapore University of Technology and Design. He is a co-founder of Lionsbot, a Singapore-headquartered robotics company which designs and manufactures autonomous cleaning robots for global deployments. Dr Mohan received his PhD and MSc degrees from the Nanyang Technological University. His research interests are in robotics with an emphasis in reconfigurable platforms as well as research problems related to robot ergonomics and autonomous systems. He has published more than 200 papers in leading journals, books, and conferences.
Dr Mohan is currently serving as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters and IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine. He is the recipient of the SG Mark Design, ASEE Best of Design in Engineering Award, IDA Design Award, Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors’ Award and A’ Design award. Dr Mohan has served in various positions of organising and technical committees of several international competitions and conferences.
Foong Shaohui
Academy Fellow
Associate Professor, EPD
SUTD
Dr Foong Shaohui is an Associate Professor in the Engineering Product Development (EPD) pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011.
He is currently the principal investigator for the Aerial Innovation Research (AIR) Laboratory @ SUTD and has significant expertise in unmanned systems and robotics and works closely with the Ministry of Defence Singapore (MINDEF) on developing intelligent micro spherical ground robots (Project STARS) and nature-inspired aerial crafts (Project MONOCO) which adapts the dispersal mechanism of maple seeds to achieve efficient flight.
Malika Meghjani
Associate Professor, ISTD
SUTD
Dr Meghjani received her PhD degree in Computer Science from McGill University, Canada in early 2017. Before joining SUTD, she was the Lead Research Scientist at Autonomous Vehicle Lab within Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). She was awarded SMART Postdoctoral Fellowship for her research proposals on “Multi-Class Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand System” and Context and Intention Aware Planning under Uncertainty for Self-Driving Cars”. Her work on “Multi-Target Rendezvous Search”, was nominated as the finalist for the best paper award at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). A start-up proposal based on her work, titled, “Multi-Agent Rendezvous on Street Networks”, won her the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network, Strategic Network Enhancement Initiative Award.
Du Yihan
Assistant Professor, ESD
SUTD
Yihan Du is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Systems and Design Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Her research interests include machine learning, with emphases on reinforcement learning and online learning, and AI safety and alignment. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during 2023-2025, working with Prof R Srikant. She obtained her PhD degree in Computer Science from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University in 2023. She has published multiple first-author papers on the top conferences in machine learning, including ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR and AAAI. She also received several honours, including the China Computer Federation (CCF) Agent and Multi-Agent System Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the Tsinghua Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Pablo Aldivia Y Alvarado
Associate Professor, EPD
SUTD
Dr Valdivia y Alvarado is an Associate Professor in the Engineering Product Development Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and a Research Affiliate in the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT and the Center of Environmental Sensing and Modeling at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.
Jeffrey Chan Kok Hui
Senior Lecturer, HASS
SUTD
Dr Jeffrey K.H. Chan received his BArch from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), his MEd in Mind, Brain and Education from Harvard University and PhD in Architecture (Design Theory and Methods) from University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on design ethics in the context of large-scale sociotechnical systems and urbanisation.
Setsuko Yokoyama
Assistant Professor, HASS
SUTD
Setsuko Yokoyama is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. She received her doctorate in English from the University of Maryland in 2020, and is one of the inaugural graduates of its Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities program. She also holds a master’s degree in Information Science from the University of Michigan School of Information, which she earned in 2015 while on the Fulbright scholarship.
Her current research investigates a colonial history of “Visible Speech”— the physiological alphabet invented in 1867 — and how it intersects with linguistic imperialism, scientific racism, and technosolutionism.