Introducing our new scientific staff member Bahar Haghighat

The Engineering and Technology institute at the University of Groningen (ENTEG) is pleased to welcome Dr. Bahar Haghighat who will start as a tenure-track assistant professor this fall in the Discrete Technology and Production Automation (DTPA) group of Prof. Dr. Ir. J.M.A. Scherpen. Her research focuses on miniaturized robot swarms for sensing, surveying, and inspection applications.

Bahar Haghighat obtained her PhD in Robotics, Control, and Intelligent Systems in 2018 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and her Master's and Bachelor's degrees respectively in Electrical Engineering/Digital Electronics and Electrical Engineering/Physics (double major) from Sharif University of Technology (SUT) in Tehran, Iran. She has been a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton and a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Radhika Nagpal. Her PhD research focused on mechatronic design and development of an aquatic swarm of miniaturized resource-constrained robotic modules capable of performing self-assembly. Her postdoctoral research focused on mechatronic design, algorithmic development, and modeling of a swarm of vibration sensing robots for infrastructure inspection applications. Bahar Haghighat has been selected as an EECS Rising Star in 2021 (MIT) and in 2019 (UIUC). She is the recipient of EPFL's PhD research award of Gilbert Hausmann for the best PhD thesis in the fields of mechanical engineering, electricity, and physics (2019), EPFL distinction of excellence for a PhD thesis in Robotics, Control, and Intelligent Systems (2018), two Swiss National Science foundation (SNSF) post-doctoral fellowship awards (2017 and 2019), and the third place in EPFL's My Thesis in 180 Seconds competition (2017).

We warmly welcome Bahar in our institute and look forward to all our future collaborations with her.