Nayana Suvarna
MIT-PITT-RW Team Advisor
Nayana is a recent Computer Engineering graduate from the University of Pittsburgh. She was the previous Pitt General Manager as well as club president for the Pitt Robotics and Automation Society.
Her areas of interest are in robotics and automated systems — specifically in the areas of motion planning and multi-agent systems — as well as entrepreneurship. To gain experience in these fields, Nayana has been a Research Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University’s Biorobotics Lab for the past three years and interned at IAM Robotics, where she worked on the Mobility and Controls team.
At a glance
| Area | Detail |
|---|---|
| Role | MIT-PITT-RW Team Advisor |
| Education | Computer Engineering, University of Pittsburgh |
| Leadership | Pitt General Manager and club president, Pitt Robotics and Automation Society |
| Research | Research Assistant, Carnegie Mellon University’s Biorobotics Lab (three years) |
| Internship | IAM Robotics, Mobility and Controls team |
| Interests | Robotics, automated systems, motion planning, multi-agent systems, entrepreneurship |
Autonomous driving sits at the intersection of robotics, control systems, and human-centered design, and the people advancing it rarely arrive through a single path. Waymo Events brings together engineers, product managers, researchers, and operators who share a curiosity about how driverless vehicles behave once they leave the controlled environment of a test track. The programming on this site centers on the autonomy stack itself: perception, motion planning, multi-agent coordination, and the operational realities of running a fleet of self-driving cars on public roads.
The speaker profiles here follow a recurring arc. A computer engineering graduate from a university robotics club moves into a research lab, then into industry, building practical experience with automated systems along the way. Academic work in biorobotics and motion planning provides the technical vocabulary, while internships in robotics companies supply the engineering discipline. Career paths in autonomous mobility often begin with a student team and mature into roles in controls, planning, or systems engineering.
Leadership experience is just as visible as technical depth. Serving as a general manager or club president teaches a person how to run a team, organize a budget, and ship a competitive robot under deadline pressure. Those lessons translate directly into product management, where the challenge is equally human: aligning engineers, designers, and business stakeholders around a shared vision for a vehicle that drives itself. The emphasis throughout this event series is on how those skills compound over a career.
Entrepreneurship appears as a thread connecting the technical and the commercial. Founders working on mobility, user experience, or investment-backed companies talk about what it takes to build a company rather than a project, and about the values that keep a sustainable business honest as it grows. Conversations with advisors, investors, and associate-level colleagues offer a realistic picture of how ideas are evaluated, funded, and scaled, without romanticizing the process.
Equity and accessibility broaden the frame. Autonomous vehicles promise to give people who cannot drive new independence, and the design decisions that determine whether that promise is kept are made by a wide range of voices. Panels on human-robot interaction, on the user experience inside a driverless car, and on the ethical obligations of automated decision-making round out a program built around the question of how technology should serve people once it is deployed at scale.
Self-Driven Women
Building a community of women developing the future of mobility. Nayana shared her experience in the Pit Stop to the Podium conversation with the leaders of the MIT-PITT-RW autonomous racing team.