Assistant Professor
Krishna Kumar is an Associate Professor in Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering and core faculty at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. His research builds deformable world models that follow a perceive, predict, control, and guarantee pipeline, coupling physics-encoded Gaussian Splatting for scene reconstruction, Graph Network Simulators for real-time terrain response, differentiable control for autonomous action, and conformal prediction for safety certification. Applications include autonomous excavation for lunar construction, multi-agent terrain manipulation, and AI-accelerated simulation. Krishna directs the $7M NSF Chishiki AI for Civil Engineering Ecosystem, holds an NSF CAREER Award, and develops open-source research tools used broadly across Physical AI.