Not every student I get to watch grow and succeed works in my lab. Some of the most rewarding moments in this job come from watching people you have only briefly worked alongside go on to do genuinely impressive things. Andrew McPartland is one of those people.
On April 24th, 2026, Andrew successfully defended his M.S. thesis in Mechanical Engineering, with a specialization in Dynamics and Controls, at the William States Lee College of Engineering at UNC Charlotte. His thesis was titled “Optimizing the Location and Time for a Mobile Robot to Unmask in an Adversarial Environment.” His committee included Dr. Artur Wolek, Dr. Scott Kelly, and Dr. Dipankar Maity.
I had the privilege of working with Andrew when he served as a teaching assistant in one of my courses. Even in that supporting role, it was clear he was someone who took both the work and the students around him seriously. He was thoughtful, well-prepared, and genuinely invested in helping others understand difficult material. Those qualities do not show up just in the classroom. They show up in research, and they show up in a thesis defense.
About the research
Andrew’s thesis tackles a genuinely challenging problem at the intersection of robotics, optimization, and autonomous decision-making. The core question is this: when a mobile robot is operating in an adversarial environment, where should it position itself, and when should it reveal its presence, in order to accomplish its mission while managing the risks that come with exposure to a threat?
That framing, while rooted in robotics and control theory, has implications well beyond any single application. Autonomous systems operating in contested or uncertain environments, whether in defense, search and rescue, infrastructure inspection, or other high-stakes domains, face exactly this kind of tradeoff between information gathering and risk exposure. Solving it rigorously requires drawing on motion planning, game theory, and optimization in ways that are far from trivial.
The fact that Andrew worked through this problem under the guidance of a strong committee and came out the other side with a defensible, original contribution to the field is a real accomplishment. Graduate research in dynamics and controls is demanding, and a thesis defense is not a formality. You earn it.
A word on what comes next
Andrew leaves UNC Charlotte and will be completing his PhD at another university. He has been awarded a prestigious fellowship that will pay for his PhD. Andrew is still evaluating options and I am sure he will make a great decision.
Congratulations, Andrew. You earned every bit of this. The department is proud of you, and so am I.