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About the Lab
We are a research group at Rutgers University studying collective intelligence across biological and engineered systems.
Our research focuses on:
- Collective behavior in animal groups, including how fish schools coordinate, explore, and make decisions.
- Dynamics and control of network systems, with an emphasis on modeling, stability, inference, and coordination.
- Bio-inspired robotics and autonomous systems, where principles from natural collectives inform the design of scalable robotic teams.
- Data-driven discovery, combining experiments, mathematical models, and machine learning to uncover mechanisms of collective behavior.
Together, we aim to understand how intelligent group behavior emerges in nature and how these principles can be translated into engineered systems.
News
From Natural-Language Prompts to Physical Circuits: Impromptu at IEEE ROSE
Congratulations to my Capstone Senior Design students Vincent Alesi, Absa Fall, Matthew Grimalovsky, and Adrian Jackson, whose project was published and presented at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Robotic … Read More
Recent work on multi-agent control for ethorobotics applications
Excited to share our new paper on MagTile, a modular and scalable platform for ethorobotics and multi-agent control. MagTile enables the control of ensembles of electromagnetically actuated agents using standardized … Read More
Modeling collective decision-making in network systems
Fresh off the press: new paper! Inspired by biological insights from fish schools, we introduce a model for collective decision-making for network systems. Think of everyday situations like: – a … Read More
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- 11/2021: Poster presentation at the Animal Behavior Live Conference [watch video]
- 09/2021: Can emotions propagate in a group of fish? check out our new study on emotional contagion [read]
- 05/2021: I will be chairing the Biological Systems session at the ACC [link]
- 05/2021: I will be chairing the session on Control at the SIAM-DS [link]
- 02/2021: Our recent work on modeling fish swimming in a flow is out in PLoS-CB! [read]
- 09/2020: Our K-12 ARISE student participated in the Student Vision Challenge and was selected to talk at the Submerge Marine Science Festival [watch video]
- 03/2020: Check our recent work on how human decisions can be controlled by virtual bots! [read more]
- 01/2020: Our work on leader-follower consensus on heterogeneous networks is featured on NYU engineering news! [read more]
- 12/2019: Our recent work on the synchronization in multiplex electrical networks is out! [read more]
- 10/2019: Our recent work on data-driven modeling of zebrafish behavior has been accepted in the journal of theoretical biology [read more]
- 08/2019: Our latest paper on network topology identification is out! [read more]
- 03/2019: I am honored to have been selected for the Provost postdoctoral fellowship program at New York University [link]. I will be working on fish collective behavior!
- 03/2019: Our new paper on distributed inference of the network topology is out! [read more]
- 05/2018: Happy to have been selected for receiving the YITP scholarship, Florence, Italy