Michelle Ho

As a kid, I wore the same Halloween costume for three or four years straight: an orange NASA astronaut jumpsuit. My parents bought it for me at the National Air and Space Museum in DC because I declared I wanted to be an astronaut when I was 5. But when I was 9, I went into a zero gravity spinner simulator at an amusement park near my hometown in Central Massachusetts, and I got so dizzy that I realized my astronaut dream probably wouldn’t work out. That’s how I landed on becoming an aerospace engineer instead.

Everyone thought I was crazy for knowing what I wanted to do that early, but I’ve never wavered. In high school, I joined a robotics team, and that was my first introduction to real engineering. I was excited to solve a hard problem with no right solution: designing, coding, and assembling a robot. During my first year of college at Princeton, I joined the Intelligent Robot Motion (IRoM) Lab, which was looking for undergraduates interested in research. That was my first time interfacing with a PhD lab. During my sophomore year, I was working on a theoretical robotics paper, and I felt like I was learning concepts more quickly for that research than I had in my classes. I had this lightbulb moment when I realized that I wanted to do research for my career. My then-advisor encouraged me to apply to a lab outside of Princeton to explore that more, so I was so happy when I got into the Stanford Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) in the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I actually worked under my current advisor, Professor Mykel Kochenderfer, in the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab (SISL), on a project on informative path planning algorithms for lunar rovers. It was so fun that I immediately knew that I needed to apply for a PhD here. Mykel wrote me a recommendation letter, and now I’m in the third year of my PhD in Stanford’s Aeronautics and Astronautics program. 

SISL’s main research focus is on decision-making under uncertainty, which is a pretty broad umbrella. My research interests are also broad, but I generally describe them as developing algorithms for trustworthy autonomy that can operate without human intervention in uncertain, complex environments. I’m working toward methods that allow robots to operate and reflect on what they’re doing, make their own decisions while considering constraints or uncertainties, and reset themselves or correct their behavior. My hope for the future is to work on sending robots to other planets, asteroids, or even caves on Mars, where you can’t rely on humans to tell a robot what to do because the communication delay is just too large. The algorithms I’m developing have a wide range of applications aside from space robotics, though. For instance, I’ve worked on mobile, legged robots that do autonomous inspection and a bimanual manipulator that manages cables in warehouses. I have so many interests that I want to explore here, and SISL makes it really easy to explore many things at once.

There’s a really warm and friendly vibe in the lab, and a big part of that is because we have regular lab lunches, socials, and retreats so that we get to know each other really well. Also, female students make up close to 50% of our lab, which is super rare for an AI/robotics lab. I’m really grateful for that because it’s been easy to build our own community. I feel that the other women in my lab and I always speak so highly of our lab and Mykel, and I have found that having a group of women who feel really positively about a lab encourages other women to join, too. I’m currently the president of the Stanford branch of the Women in Aeronautics and Astronautics (WIAA) organization, so I interact with all the women in the department a lot. In WIAA, we do a lot of things to foster community between women and gender minorities with an interest in aerospace from any department. We have over 200 members, and our social events are really important and helpful because you don’t always get to see people if they work in different fields, like structures or propulsion, when you’re in robotics. We have funding allocated to send members to conferences like AIAA SciTech and the Society of Women Engineers Conference, to release some financial burden and make attending more accessible. We also do outreach to local K-12 groups. We’ve recently been doing some astrophysics demos for high schoolers in San Jose. It’s a really great community and definitely necessary in a field where women are underrepresented. 

One other thing I love about my time here is that Mykel likes us to treat our research like a 9-to-5 job, so he encourages us to have work-life balance. I love hiking, and the Bay Area has many scenic trails that are accessible from campus. If I have a little bit of free time, I’ll drive up to the nature preserves behind Stanford. One time, one of my SISL labmates, who is really interested in operations in extreme environments, brought us on an expedition to fly a drone in a cave to do some 3D mapping of its interior and get data to create a simulation. I love that work and play can intersect here.