5/7/2026 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
Through high-profile research projects, mechanical engineering alum Hamidreza Jafarnejadsani (PhD ME 2018) seeks to address the question of how autonomous and AI-enabled robots can be trusted to operate safely in uncertain and complex real-world environments.
Now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, Sani was named one of this year’s recipients of MechSE’s Outstanding Young Alumni Award.
“It was a dream come true for me to come to Illinois,” said Sani, who completed his master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Calgary and his bachelor’s in ME at the University of Tehran, where he received national academic distinction. “The doctoral student community is very diverse and vibrant at Illinois. No matter what your interests are, you can find people who share them.”
Advised by W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins professor Naira Hovakimyan, Sani’s doctoral research focused on robust adaptive sampled-data control for multi-input multi-output systems to address emerging challenges in cyber-physical security. He collaborated on Hovakimyan’s L1 adaptive control theory, extending it to multi-rate and sampled-data frameworks.
Following his graduation, Sani completed a postdoctoral research position in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, where he focused on adaptive autopilots for fixed-wing aircraft.
“Typically, when there’s an engine failure or partial structural failure, a human pilot will take control of the aircraft,” he said. “Our goal was to develop an adaptive autopilot that could operate the craft not just during functional flight but also during severe failures.”
After one year in his postdoctoral position, Sani joined the faculty at Stevens and founded the Safe Autonomous Systems Lab. He was the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation award for attack-resilient unmanned aerial vehicles and a co-principal investigator on a grant funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency’s Walk-Through Rendering from Images of Varying Altitude (WRIVA) program that focuses on collecting and processing images from ground-level, aerial, and satellite imaging platforms to support robust perception and autonomy.
“To address the safety and resilience of autonomous robotic systems, we design autonomy architectures and algorithms for learning, decision-making, and control to make these systems robust to uncertainties, faults, and adversarial influences,” he said. “Over the last several years at Stevens, my group has advanced approaches for safe learning-enabled navigation, adversarial vision-based perception and defenses, and distributed detection and coordination in networked multi-robot systems. These contributions respond directly to emerging challenges in cyber-physical security and safety for AI-enabled and autonomous robots such as drones or self-driving cars in safety-critical applications.”
Outside of his own research, Sani mentors undergraduate and master’s-level students on their own research interests and activities.
“I encourage students to seek research opportunities through internships and laboratory positions,” he said. “The laboratory environment provides opportunity to immerse in open-ended research problems and focus on practical problem solving, which will be useful for both industry and graduate school.”
Sani credits his time on campus with preparing him to succeed in his current role.
“As faculty, whether advising students for research or teaching classes, my work builds on experiences from my time at Illinois,” he said. “As systems become more autonomous and interconnected, the challenges we face will only grow in complexity. The kind of rigorous and comprehensive training that MechSE provides will prepare the next generation of engineers and scientists who are well-equipped to take on those challenges.”