Rachel Holladay
Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRachel Holladay is a robotics researcher and educator focused on dexterous, multi-step manipulation in unstructured environments. She earned her PhD in computer science from MIT (MCube Lab and LIS Group), where she was co-advised by Alberto Rodriguez and Tomás Lozano-Pérez and supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship; she previously earned a BS in Computer Science and Robotics from Carnegie Mellon. Her work integrates contact mechanics, computational geometry, motion planning, control, and task planning to enable planning and execution of real-world robot tasks such as cooking or tidying a room. She is on the academic job market for 2023-2024 and is slated to join the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025, reflecting a strong trajectory in robotics education and research. In addition to research, she actively contributes to open educational resources, notably as a technical writer for the MIT manipulations course notes (RussTedrake/manipulation). Based in Philadelphia, she brings experience from MIT, CMU, and collaboration with leading researchers to bridge theory and hardware in service of reliable autonomous manipulation.
10 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 (3)
robotics10
documentation10
documentations10
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
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