Soofiyan Atar

Ph.D. Student, Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab
University of California San Diego (UCSD)

I am a Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Michael Yip at UC San Diego, researching dexterous manipulation, surgical robotics, and robot learning. My work focuses on enabling humanoid robots to perform precise, contact-rich actions in surgical and assistive settings.

Before UCSD, I was a Research Assistant at the UW × Amazon Science Hub, where I worked on improving robot perception and grasping through AI-based optimization and vision-language models for the Amazon warehouse automation. I also collaborated at the Applied Physics Lab (UW) on 3D ultrasound reconstruction and contributed to projects at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay on autonomous robotic systems for agricultural environments.