Luke Strgar
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Northwestern University, advised by Sam Kriegman in the Xenobot Lab. I have also spent time as a student researcher on the Paradigms of Intelligence team at Google.
I received my MSc. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where I worked with David Harwath on self-supervised speech segmentation. Before that, I earned my B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, working with Justin Remais on mathematical models of infectious disease dynamics. Between these degrees, I held research positions with Tim Gardner at the University of Oregon and Young Hwang Chang at the Knight Cancer Institute.
Research
I am interested in intelligent systems that adapt across multiple timescales. Biological organisms not only evolve over generations, but also learn extensively during their lifetimes; these intertwined processes shape their bodies, behaviors, and capabilities. To study this interplay, I develop algorithms and simulations that jointly design robot morphologies and control policies, using both evolutionary and gradient-based methods, to produce agents capable of adaptive behavior. A central focus of my work is understanding how to induce properties such as modularity, compositionality, and diversity, which are widespread in natural organisms but challenging to reproduce in artificial systems.