Sarah H.Q. Li
Sarah Li is an assistant professor at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, a faculty member of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, a faculty member of ML@GT, and an affiliate of the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute at Georgia Tech. Her research advances multi-agent models and algorithms to overcome challenges facing future air and space mobility systems. Her technical work lies at the intersection of game theory, stochastic control, and optimization to enable optimal and safe decision-making of autonomous systems in interactive settings. Sarah earned her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington and her B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia.
Professor Li’s teaching interests encompass undergraduate and graduate courses in control theory, dynamic games, and convex optimization. She is dedicated to preparing students with a solid foundation in theoretical and applied aspects of modeling, problem-solving skills, and integrating computational and experimental methods. Her teaching approach supports active student engagement across core and advanced curriculum components.
Professor Li’s research focuses on decision-making and control for interacting autonomous systems under uncertainty. She develops game-theoretic, optimization, and learning-based methods to coordinate multi-agent cyber-physical systems when intentions and environments are partially observed. Her work targets aerospace systems, space traffic management, transportation, and robotics, emphasizing robustness, incentive-compatible mechanisms, and uncertainty-aware performance guarantees, using formal methods, stochastic models, and scalable algorithms for safety-critical, networked autonomy at scale.
- Cyberphysical Systems, Safety, Security and Reliability
- Robotics, Autonomy, & Human Interactions
Control, Cooperation, and Competition under Uncertainty (C3U) Laboratory
- Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Washington 2023
- B.A.Sc in Engineering Physics with a minor in Honors Mathematics, University of British Columbia 2017.
2020 Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellow 2022 University of Washington Condit Graduate Fellow 2022 Rising Star in Aerospace Engineering 2022 Rising Star in Cyber-physical Systems.
- T Karampela, R Seshadri, F Dorfler, SH Li, MPC for momentum counter-balanced and zero-impulse contact with a free-spinning satellite, AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum, 0407, 2026
- J Corbin, SHQ Li, J Rogers, Allocating Corrective Control to Mitigate Multi-agent Safety Violations Under Private Preferences, arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.12616, 2026
- F Ferrara, LWS Arana, F Dörfler, SHQ Li, A Markov Decision Process Framework for Early Maneuver Decisions in Satellite Collision Avoidance, AAS Boston, 2025
- SV Sangeetha, CY Chiu, SHQ Li, S Kousik, Language Conditioning Improves Accuracy of Aircraft Goal Prediction in Untowered Airspace, ICRA 2026
- C Salinas-Rodriguez, J Rogers, SHQ Li, When the Correct Model Fails: The Optimality of Stackelberg Equilibria with Follower Intention Updates, arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.07363, 2025