I am a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, where I was first appointed in 2019. I also obtained my PhD in 2021 from Stellenbosch University, at the Electronic Systems Laboratory (ESL) under the supervision of Corné van Daalen and Johan du Preez. The topic of my dissertation was Degenerate Gaussian factors for probabilistic inference (view PDF).

My decision for a career in academia has largely been influenced by a passion for education in South Africa. As Nelson Mandela once said: "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." In addition, I enjoy learning new concepts and then applying them in order to solve real-world problems.

My broad research interest lies at the intersection of robotics and machine learning, specifically on the software side of things. My overarching goal is to unify concepts and algorithms from reinforcement learning, optimal control theory and numerical optimization in order to develop autonomous systems with optimal decision-making capabilities. The main application areas are robotics (to demonstrate the real-world relevance of my research) and games (which provide a safe and easy-to-simulate testbed).