Rate My Professor Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi

Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at San Diego State University, where she also serves as the director of the Dynamic Systems and Intelligent Machines Lab. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Université du Québec École de Technologie Supérieure, her M.S. from Tarbiat Modares University, and her B.S. from the University of Tehran. Prior to her appointment at SDSU, Dr. Nili Ahmadabadi held a position as an Assistant Professor at Wichita State University and worked as a noise control engineer at Dana Incorporated. Her academic and professional trajectory has centered on advancing control systems and perception technologies for intelligent machines.

Dr. Nili Ahmadabadi's research interests encompass robot perception, robot control, nonlinear dynamical systems, acoustic perception, cooperative robotics, robot learning, motion planning, deep learning and sequence modeling, autonomy, and autonomous fault detection. Her projects develop acoustic perception and control frameworks that enable robots to perform sensorimotor exploration, locate sound sources in non-convex fields and cluttered environments, and support human-robot interactions across physical barriers. Applications include search-and-rescue operations for disaster victims, predictive maintenance by identifying abnormal equipment sounds, marine animal tracking, and locating signals in maritime settings. She has received significant recognition through major grants: a $990,000 Early Career Award from the U.S. Army Research Office in 2024 for continuous-time extremum seeking control frameworks; a $519,815 award from the ONR Science of Autonomy Program in 2024 for model-free control systems in dynamic maritime environments; and a $250,000 grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory in 2022 for physics-based machine learning models for sound source detection accounting for multi-path effects and atmospheric influences. Key publications include "Online Search of Unknown Terrains Using a Dynamical System" with K. Sridharan in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2020); acoustic source localization in Applied Acoustics (2016); nonlinear vibration control and energy harvesting in Journal of Sound and Vibration (2014); and stability analysis of extremum seeking in Automatica (2025). Her contributions enhance robotic capabilities in complex real-world scenarios and prepare students for advancements in robotics and autonomous systems.