Dr. Maani Ghaffari

Staff ML Research Engineer, Automated Driving Advanced Development

Dr. Maani Ghaffari is a staff machine learning (ML) research engineer in the Automated Driving Advanced Development division at Toyota Research Institute (TRI). He is currently on leave from the University of Michigan, where he is a tenured associate professor at the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering and the Department of Robotics.

At the University of Michigan, he founded the Computational Autonomy and Robotics Laboratory (CURLY). His research focuses on the theory and applications of robotics and autonomous systems, with an emphasis on developing efficient, generalizable algorithms that enable robots to operate in unstructured, dynamic, and uncertain environments.

Dr. Ghaffari earned a Ph.D. in engineering (robotics) from the Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Technology Sydney, in Australia. He received the 2025 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) and the 2021 Amazon Research Awards. Dr. Ghaffari has been an associate editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics.