Amy Pajak

Amy Pajak

Master's Student & Research Assistant · GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania

Hi! I'm Amy 👋 I'm a master's student in Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania, supported by the Thouron Award, a full merit-based scholarship for graduate study. I'm currently working as a Research Assistant in the GRASP Lab, and a member of the Lifelong Machine Learning Research Group led by Eric Eaton where my research centres on continual / lifelong learning and embodied AI - building agents that keep learning over time and can generalize across new tasks.

Previously I was a Machine Learning Engineer at Meta (WhatsApp) and a Research Engineer at Goldman Sachs. I hold a First-Class Honours BSc (4.0 GPA) in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Birmingham.

CV Scholar GitHub LinkedIn

Research Interests

I work on machine learning for agents that act in the world and keep learning over time. My interests span continual / lifelong learning, reinforcement learning, and embodied AI - and I enjoy turning recent research into working systems on real and simulated robots.

Publications & Patents

For the full and most up-to-date list, see my Google Scholar profile.

Experience

May 2026 – Present

University of Pennsylvania — GRASP Lab

— Research Assistant

Robotics research in the GRASP Laboratory for the DARPA Triage Challenge, advancing autonomous robotic search and triage in simulated mass-casualty incidents.

  • Develop, implement, and evaluate algorithms for robot perception, reasoning, learning, autonomy, and control, integrating them with the lab's multi-robot fleet.
  • Design and run scientific experiments for evaluations.
Sep 2024 – Jul 2025

Meta

— Machine Learning Engineer

WhatsApp. Built ranking, search, and recommendations for the Updates tab (Status & Channels), used by 1.5B+ people daily.

Jul 2021 – Sep 2024

Goldman Sachs

— Research Engineer, AI Research

Associate in the AI Research team within the Data Science and Machine Learning group.

  • Selected and applied state-of-the-art ML models to real-world NLP problems.
  • Fine-tuned and deployed deep learning models for information extraction — NER, summarization, and question answering.
  • Researched new ML methods through independent study, experimentation, and internal knowledge-sharing communities.
  • Productionised models and algorithms to improve existing systems and products.
Jun 2019 – Jun 2020

IBM

— Software Engineer

Placement year as an L3 Engineer in cloud and cognitive software, primarily in C++. Achieved a 60× speed-up via asynchronous threading for batch message sending, shipped to production with gMock and component tests.

Sep 2016 – Sep 2017

Hertzian

— Software Developer

Full-stack developer at an AI start-up, building back-end data-analysis systems and front-end web apps in Python and JavaScript. Led "Hertzian Health", an NHS project analysing patient feedback across U.K. wards.

Education

Aug 2025 – Present

University of Pennsylvania

— MSE, Robotics
  • Concentration in Artificial Intelligence.
  • Thouron Award scholar, Wharton Graduate Rowing Crew, Neurotech@Penn
  • Graduate Research Assistant in the GRASP Lab.
Sep 2017 – Jul 2021

University of Birmingham

— BSc Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science (Hons, with Industrial Year)
  • First-Class Honours, 4.0 GPA, and a first in my dissertation.
  • Notable modules: C/C++, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Robotics.

Technical Skills