Pete was born and raised in the Bay Area of California, and now spends his time developing next-generation robots as a PhD student in Computer Science at MIT. Before MIT, Pete did his undergraduate degree at Princeton (Phi Beta Kappa), where he majored in Chemistry and won the Shapiro Prize for being within the top 2% of his class. Pete then did a one-year Master’s at Cambridge (U.K.), where he wrote a thesis on Physics. His employment experiences have included working for NASA and working for a venture-backed startup back at home in Silicon Valley for a year before starting his PhD.
Pete is passionate about cutting-edge robotics and about educating and inspiring engineers and scientists. His robotics research has been published in the top robotics journals (ICRA), and his robotics videos have been viewed over 700,000 times on YouTube. His primary research is related to increasing the capabilities of MIT’s autonomous quadcopter racing team. Pete has also taught robotics workshops to hundreds of high school students across the U.S.