Reza Ahmadzadeh is an Assistant Professor with the Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER and also the director of the Persistent Autonomy and Robot Learning (PeARL) lab. Previously, Reza was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Humanoid Sensing and Perception lab in the iCub Facility at Italian Institute of Technology. Reza received his Ph.D. in “Robotics, Cognition and Interaction Technologies” from the University of Genoa in collaboration with the Department of Advanced Robotics at Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). His research focuses on developing machine learning algorithms and their application to robot autonomy and physical Human-Robot Interaction. His research interests include Learning from Demonstration, Learning Reactive Behavior, Reinforcement Learning, physical Human-Robot Interaction, and Optimization Algorithms.