Frederike Dümbgen

Frederike Dümbgen will join the Mechanical Engineering Department Faculty as an assistant professor in Spring 2026.

Frederike’s research goal is to improve the efficiency and safety of robots and, more generally, engineered systems, acting in the physical world for and with humans. She tackles this challenge by building on advances in the optimization and machine learning community, with a focus on certifiable methods and globally optimal methods. In doing so, she aims to create a path toward principled, solid foundations for the next generation of robotics and intelligent machines that can scale to solve the world’s pressing problems, be it in design and manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, or assistive technology. 

Frederike is currently a researcher in the Willow team of Inria Paris, where she has been working on optimization for robotics since 2024. Before joining Inria, she spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute of the University of Toronto. Frederike holds a Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from EPFL, with a minor in Computational Science and Engineering. She performed her Master's thesis at the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH Zürich and gained experience in industry as an intern at Disney Research and ABB, among others.