Congratulations to Kasun Weerakoon, who has been awarded the 2023-2024 George Harhalakis Outstanding Systems Engineering Graduate Student Award. This award is presented annually by the UMD Institute of Systems Research (ISR). He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Kasun joined the University of Maryland in 2019 after earning a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from our department. He is a graduate research assistant in Professor Dinesh Manocha’s Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion and Animation (GAMMA) Lab.

His research interests include robotics, reinforcement learning, and autonomous systems, with a focus on robot perception and planning. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he is studying autonomous robot navigation in complex outdoor environments.

Kasun also received the University of Maryland Graduate School’s 2022-2023 Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant award.