People
Our group is passionate about analysis, design, and control of dynamic systems.
Principal Investigator
Damiano Zanotto, PhD
dzanotto@stevens.edu
Damiano Zanotto is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ), where he directs the Wearable Robotic Systems Laboratory. He earned his PhD in Mechatronics from the University of Padua, Italy. Prior to joining Stevens, he worked as an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University (New York, NY). He is the recipient of several awards, including the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Outstanding Associate Editor award in 2023 and 2024, the NSF CAREER award in 2020, and the Columbia University Translational Fellowship in 2015. His research group has received support through several grants from the NSF, NIH, DoD, NJ-DOH, as well as various foundations.
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He currently serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and Wearable Technologies (Cambridge Univ. Press). Dr. Zanotto is an affiliated faculty member of Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI).
Kai-Chun Liu received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 2015 and 2019, respectively. He joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Summer 2025 as a Research Scientist. Prior to joining Stevens, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (2020–2023). He subsequently served as faculty in the Department of Electronic Engineering at National Taipei University of Technology (2023–2024) and as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2024–2025). His research focuses on machine learning methods for functional digital biomarker development and wearable computing.
Sejal Behere received her B.Tech. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, India, in May 2022 and her M.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering (Robotics) from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2024. She joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab in Fall 2024 as a Visiting Research Associate. Her work focuses on hardware/firmware design and prototyping for embedded wearable sensing systems.
Qingya Zhao received her B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Hunan University in July 2018 and her M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (robotics and control concentration) from Columbia University in 2020. She joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab in Spring 2021 as a Ph.D. student. Her research focuses on wearable-based gait analysis in controlled and real-world environments to assess physical function in clinical populations with gait impairments. She has contributed multimodal sensor platforms and machine-learning pipelines that enable decentralized, stride-level spatiotemporal and kinetic gait monitoring.
Andy Li is a Ph.D. candidate in the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis (2020) and his M.S. in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Sheffield (2022). Since Fall 2022, he has been developing user-tailored, untethered ankle exoskeletons and reinforcement learning–based rehabilitation controllers for personalized physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) in exoskeleton-based gait training and robot-assisted arm-reaching exercises, validating these methods in both healthy adults and individuals with musculoskeletal and neurological movement impairments.
Haoran Li received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from South China University of Technology in May 2022 and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (Robotics and Control) from Columbia University in May 2024. He then joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab as a Ph.D. student in the Robotics program. His research focuses on the design of personalized ankle exoskeletons and the development of computational models and task-agnostic controllers for these systems.
Laura De Marzi received her B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in July 2021 and her M.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from George Mason University in 2023. She joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab in Fall 2024 as a Ph.D. student. Her research focuses on machine learning methods for wearable sensing, with an emphasis on AI-enabled analytical pipelines for extended-time, real-world, stride-level gait monitoring using instrumented insoles.
Vidhi Palan received her B.Tech. degree in Computer Engineering from Charusat University, India, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. She joined the WRS Lab as a Graduate Assistant 1.3 years ago and focuses on building and deploying web-based systems to support clinical and research applications. She led the development of the AI-Sole website, designed intuitive and user-friendly dashboards for data visualization and monitoring, and contributed to automating existing workflows to improve efficiency and reliability. Her role also involves developing and deploying automation pipelines for data conversion, working extensively with Linux servers, and maintaining these systems to ensure scalability, accessibility, and seamless use by researchers and clinicians.
Swapnil Gautam received his B.Tech. degree in Mechatronics from NMIMS, India, in 2020 and is currently pursuing an M.S. degree in Applied Artificial Intelligence at Stevens Institute of Technology (expected graduation: May 2026). He joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab in January 2025 as an AI Research Assistant. His research focuses on wearable-based gait parameter estimation, specifically developing semi-supervised models to estimate center-of-pressure (COP) trajectories from insole-embedded sensors in clinical populations.
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Anvesh Kanth received his B.sc. in Data Science from Osmania University, India in 2024. He is currently working towards his M.S. in Applied Artificial Intelligence from Stevens Institute of Technology. He joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab in January 2026 as an AI Research Assistant, focusing on cloud-based clinical dashboards for sensor-based mHealth applications.
Manoj Parasuram Sadanala received his B.Tech. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Amrita University (India) and is currently pursuing an M.S. degree in Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. He joined the Wearable Robotic Systems Lab in February 2026, working on design and integration of embedded wearable sensing systems for gait monitoring. Specifically, he has been leading hardware development, IMU integration, firmware design, and real-time data acquisition. His interests include wearable computing, embedded systems, and hardware–software co-design for digital health applications.
Alumni
Former PhD students
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Huanghe Zhang, PhD
Yufeng Zhang, PhD
yzhan21@stevens.edu
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Shuai Li,PhD sli100@stevens.edu
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Ton Duong,PhD duong0@stevens.edu
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Visiting Scholars
Maximilian Dölling
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Rodrigo Nogueira
Lorenzo Scalera, PhD
scalera.lorenzo@spes.uniud.it
Chiara Passarini, Phd
chiara.passarini@phd.unipd.it
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Riccardo Minto, Phd
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Master's students
Shubham Patidar
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Daniel Rosenson
Saniya Attar
Jack Moss
Patrick Dalrymple
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Arun Aruljothi
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Daniellle Napoli
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Yefei Yin
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Yufei Wu
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Bo Su
bsu4@stevens.edu
Kiril Manchevski
kmanchev@stevens.edu
Roger Kleinmann
rkleinma@stevens.edu
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Qianwen Zhao
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Hunter Schmidt
UG students
Leo Musacchia
Carly Walker
Luke Magette
Dolcinea Carroll
Matthew Gibson
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Joseph J. Yang
Gina Dorsey
Parker Petty
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Dominick diMaggio
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Deven Woolford
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Kelly DiResto
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Andrew Underwood
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Stefan Olaguera
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Thomas Colarusso
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Thomas Moran
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Kaitlyn R. Casiano
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James T. Riley II
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Qianwen Zhao
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Mey Young Olivares Tay
molivar1@stevens.edu
Emily Cooke
ecooke1@stevens.edu
Naomi Javitt
naomijavitt@gmail.com
Shelby Stewart
sstewar4@stevens.edu
Julia Panko
jpanko@stevens.edu
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Michael Frissora
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Hanyu Gan
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Adam Schmidt
