Negar Mehr

Negar Mehr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, a position she assumed in January 2024. She directs the Intelligent Control (ICON) Lab. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she was also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. From 2019 to 2020, Mehr served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Smart Traffic Operation: from Human-Driven Cars to Mixed Vehicle Autonomy,” advised by Roberto Horowitz. Her B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering was obtained from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, in 2013.

Mehr's research interests lie at the intersection of robotics, control theory, game theory, and machine learning. She develops algorithms and mathematical models enabling autonomous systems to interact safely and intelligently with humans and other agents in unstructured environments. Her work has applications in space exploration, autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles, and assistive robots. She has published in leading journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, Robotics: Science and Systems, and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Notable publications include “Maximum-entropy multi-agent dynamic games: Forward and inverse solutions” (Mehr et al., 2023, IEEE Transactions on Robotics), “How will the presence of autonomous vehicles affect the equilibrium state of traffic networks?” (Mehr and Horowitz, 2019, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems), “Potential iLQR: A potential-minimizing controller for planning multi-agent interactive trajectories” (Kavuncu et al., 2021, Robotics: Science and Systems), “Game-theoretic planning for risk-aware interactive agents” (Wang et al., 2020, IEEE/RSJ IROS), and “Learning contraction policies from offline data” (Rezazadeh et al., 2022, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters). Mehr is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the 2020 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award. She has been recognized as a Rising Star in EECS, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Professional Email: negar@berkeley.edu