Nicholas (Nick) Rotella is a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, CA.  He studied at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, NY from which he received a B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2012. 

Having spent the summer/fall of 2011 performing computational neuroscience research in the Joe Francis Lab at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, NY, Nick decided to pursue graduate studies in robotics as the field combined his interests in neuroscience and mechatronics.  He joined the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab at USC in 2012 to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Nick received a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from in 2014 and passed his PhD screening process in fall 2016; his proposed thesis title is "Estimation-Based Control for Humanoid Robots."  His research interests include optimal estimation and control for legged robotic systems, controlling contact interactions for locomotion and trajectory optimization for planning of complex motor control tasks.