2025 Alumni Industry Roundtable Panel
Date: Friday, October 3, 2025
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Location: 665 Commonwealth Ave., CDS 1101
This is an alumni industry roundtable event where we have invited alumni to come speak at a panel with our current students. We are hosting this event to foster meaningful connections between our students and successful alumni. They will be sharing insight into their current role, key milestones and challenges in their career, and valuable lessons learned and advice for students aspiring to enter their field.
Panelists include:
Charles Saunders is a Senior Research Scientist at MathWorks in the Advanced Research & Technology Office. His research focuses on computational imaging, computer vision, and inverse problems, with particular interest in 3D imaging systems and depth sensing.
He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in 2021 under Prof. Vivek K Goyal, where he worked on occluder-aided non-line-of-sight imaging. This work, featured on the cover of Nature, helped establish new directions in computational imaging. He later joined Meta Reality Labs, where he developed depth system simulators and algorithms for AR/VR devices, before moving to MathWorks.
At MathWorks, Dr. Saunders manages a research grant program that supports collaborations with leading universities with an aim to accelerate adoption of research results in MathWorks’ products. Through this role, he regularly co-advises graduate students with faculty partners, helping connect academic research with industry priorities. He is co-chair and organizer of the MathWorks Research Summit, an annual event bringing together researchers and industry practitioners.
Her research on ultra-low-power circuit design for healthcare has been presented at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) and the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), and published in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems (TBioCAS), IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC), and Nature.
Qijun’s work has been recognized with the 2025 IEEE TBioCAS Best Paer Award, first place in the 2019 IMS/RFIC Graduate Student Challenge, the 2023 ISSCC Predoctoral Achievement Award, the 2024 ISSCC Rising Star Award, and the Boston University 2024 Outstanding Electrical Engineering Dissertation Award.
Samuel C. Pinto received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronic engineering from Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2021 from Boston University, Boston, MA, USA under the supervision of Sean Andersson. Since then, he works for the pre-development team at Magna Electronics designing automated driving systems for mass-market vehicles. His research interests include robotics, autonomous driving and the intersection between estimation and control.
Zack Serlin is currently the Chief Scientist at HavocAI. In this role, he is leading a team shaping the future of collaborative autonomy at scale in the maritime domain. He was previously a technical staff research scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he led a team of scientists focused on multi-agent autonomy and AI for national security applications. He has worked extensively on autonomy programs funded through DARPA, the Army, MDA and OUSDR&E. His work has focused on command and control of large heterogenous, multi-agent autonomous systems from high level specification languages, verifiable reinforcement learning based strategy generation, safe control of high-dimensional systems, and foundation models for embodied semantic understanding. Zack’s work has been a finalist at the 2022 R&D 100 awards and has over 25 peer-reviewed publications. He holds a BS and MS from Tufts University and a PhD from Boston University, all in Mechanical Engineering.