Dominique Regli, a senior studying engineering mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was named a 2024 recipient of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). The purpose of the five-year fellowship is to ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the U.S. and broaden participation in diverse talents in STEM. The award, which provides three years of financial support, including an annual stipend, will support Regli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she will begin her doctoral studies this fall.
Regli’s primary area of interest is robotics, and for her last undergraduate semester she is completing a research-based thesis at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh focused on detecting unsafe interactions between a human and a robot while the robot is performing an assistive bathing task.
Regli in her role as volunteer for the FIRST Robotics Competition
“This work can be applied to robots designed to help people with activities of daily living, and these safety measures are essential to seeing robots employed in eldercare and rehabilitative settings in the future,” she says.
At Johns Hopkins, Regli was an undergraduate assistant in the Intelligent Medical Robotic Systems and Equipment (IMERSE) Lab, where she focused on improving precision in autonomous surgery by integrating a haptic sensor into a tool used by a surgical robotic system, like the da Vinci machine. As an undergraduate, she also interned with MIT Lincoln Labs, DEKA Research & Development, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and volunteers with the FIRST Robotics Competition.
“At Hopkins, working in robotics, I discovered and realized my passion for research in meaningful ways,” she says. “That is what helped me decide to pursue graduate studies in robotics.”