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Jessica Tingley

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Finalist

General information

Hobbies & Interests

  • Animals
  • Reading
  • Music
  • Art

Bio

I'm a PhD student in Robotics at the University of Michigan, working with the Robot Studio on AURA, a project exploring what it means for a human artist and a robot to paint together. The robot senses an artist's physiological state in real time and responds by adjusting how it moves and paints alongside them. AURA isn't about replacing the artist. The robot is a collaborator, not a substitute for the person holding the brush, and one of the project's central goals is to use artists' biometric signals to help authenticate a piece as genuinely human-made, so credit and ownership stay with the artist even as robots and AI become part of the creative process. I come to this work from a background in mechanical engineering and computer science at the University of Rhode Island, with research spanning multi-robot assembly automation, drone localization, and reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation, including time as a Robotics Institute Summer Scholar at Carnegie Mellon. AURA is where that systems-and-controls background meets a newer interest: building robots people can trust to work with them, not instead of them.

Education

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Doctoral degree program (PhD, MD, JD, etc.)

2026 – 2031

Majors:
  • Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automation Engineering

University of Rhode Island

Bachelor's degree program

2021 – 2026

Majors:
  • Computer Science
  • Mechanical Engineering

Miscellaneous

Medical school interest:
No

Career

Miscellaneous

Dream career field:
Research, Philanthropy
Work experience:
5 years
Has nursing license:
No
Jessica Tingley Student Profile | Bold.org