Hi! My name is Kyle Morgenstein and I am a third year PhD student in the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin advised by Professor Luis Sentis. I'm excited about building human-centered robots and their potential to fundamentally improve the lives of humans. My work seeks to answer questions surrounding emergent social behaviors with safety and explainability guarantees. More specifically, I employ learning based methods to give robots the ability to understand, learn from, and respond to social context in accordance with observed social norms, and to continue learning from new social situations throughout the robot's deployment. 

Additionally, I am an incoming research intern at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute where I will continue my research in social norm setting and robo-ethics. I spent the previous three summers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I worked on scalable simulation infrastructure and long-term autonomy for space exploration missions. I have supported the PSYCHE, EELS, and CADRE programs.

I graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in spring of 2020 with degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Earth Atmospheric & Planetary Science, and won the Christopher Goetze Award for undergraduate research. 

When I'm not playing with robots, I am an an avid hiker, rower, and tinkerer. I also enjoy cooking, drawing, lifting weights, chocolate ice cream (edit: I am now lactose intolerant), and Club Penguin.