PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ajay Mandlekar

Ajay Mandlekar is a robotics researcher whose work links human demonstrations, robot learning and simulation. He earned degrees at Caltech and Stanford, and completed a Stanford Ph.D. on building robot intelligence through human supervision. He coauthored RoboTurk, robomimic, MineDojo, MimicGen, RoboCasa and GR00T N1, and coauthored SimFoundry in June 2026 to turn real-world video into interactive simulation. He is a Staff Research Scientist at NVIDIA AI's GEAR lab, where he leads simulation-based research for humanoid foundation models.

Now at
NVIDIA
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Timeline

  1. 2016–2022

    Caltech and Stanford degrees

    He studies at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino before earning a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science at Caltech in 2016 and an M.S. in computer science at Stanford in 2018. His Stanford Ph.D. in electrical engineering spans 2016–2022 under Silvio Savarese and Fei-Fei Li; his 2021 dissertation, Building Robot Intelligence by Scaling Human Supervision, studies RoboTurk and robot learning from human demonstrations.

  2. 2018–2019

    RoboTurk data collection

    He coauthors RoboTurk, a CoRL 2018 platform for learning robotic skills through imitation. In 2019, he coauthors an IROS study that reports over 111 hours of robot manipulation data and more than 2,000 successful demonstrations from 54 users across three tasks in one week.

  3. 2021

    Offline robot learning

    In 2021, he and his coauthors compare six offline learning algorithms across five simulated and three real-world multi-stage robot manipulation tasks. They open-source the datasets and algorithm implementations for future research.

  4. 2022

    MineDojo wins a NeurIPS award

    In 2022, he coauthors MineDojo, a Minecraft-based framework with thousands of open-ended tasks and an internet-scale knowledge base. The paper receives a NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award.

  5. 2022–2025

    NVIDIA Seattle and MimicGen

    He works as a research scientist at NVIDIA's Seattle Robotics Lab from January 2022 to June 2025. In 2023, he coauthors MimicGen, which generates over 50,000 demonstrations from fewer than 200 human demonstrations across 18 tasks.

  6. 2024

    RoboCasa simulations

    In 2024, he coauthors RoboCasa, a simulation framework for training generalist robots in everyday environments. It provides diverse kitchen scenes, thousands of 3D assets, and 100 evaluation tasks.

  7. March 2025

    GR00T N1 for humanoids

    In March 2025, he coauthors GR00T N1, an open foundation model for humanoid robots. Its vision-language module interprets the environment and language instructions, while a diffusion transformer generates fluid motor actions in real time.

  8. Since July 2025

    Research at NVIDIA GEAR

    He joins NVIDIA's GEAR Lab as a research scientist in July 2025 and leads simulation-based research for humanoid foundation models. He is a Staff Research Scientist at NVIDIA AI in the GEAR lab. In June 2026, he coauthors SimFoundry, a system that turns a single real-world video into an interactive simulation for policy training and evaluation.

Career

  1. Since 2022NVIDIAResearch Scientist, Staff Research Scientist

Education

  1. 2022Stanford UniversityPhD in electrical engineering
  2. 2018Stanford UniversityM.S. in computer science
  3. 2016California Institute of TechnologyB.S. in electrical engineering and computer science

From the biography.

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Ajay Mandlekar. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes NVIDIA. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  3. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes NVIDIA. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  4. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes NVIDIA. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Ajay Mandlekar yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Ajay Mandlekar ai.stanford.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Building robot intelligence by scaling human supervision | Stanford Digital Repository purl.stanford.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. RoboTurk: Human Reasoning and Dexterity for Large-Scale Dataset Creation | SAIL Blog ai.stanford.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation | SAIL Blog ai.stanford.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. NeurIPS 2022 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [2206.08853] MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrations mimicgen.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. [2406.02523] RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots | NVIDIA Learning and Perception Research research.nvidia.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. [2503.14734] GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. SimFoundry — Real2Sim2Real research.nvidia.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. [2606.28276] SimFoundry: Modular and Automated Scene Generation for Policy Learning and Evaluation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.