Fatima Tanveer

Fatima Tanveer is an undergraduate Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Lafayette College and a Marquis Fellow ’29, currently conducting robotics research at Lehigh University in Professor Mayuresh Kothare’s Control Systems Lab through the STEM-SI program. Her academic and technical focus centers on legged locomotion, autonomous navigation, and reinforcement learning, with hands-on experience in ROS 2, C++, and PyTorch. She has built and simulated multiple autonomous systems, including obstacle-avoiding robots and navigation stacks that integrate SLAM, Vector Field Histogram (VFH) planning, and real-time decision-making architectures.

Beyond her technical work, Fatima is actively involved in research and innovation at the intersection of robotics, control systems, and artificial intelligence. Her work spans model-based reinforcement learning for dynamic systems, FPGA/GPU benchmarking for robotic computation pipelines, and sim-to-real learning approaches for autonomous agents. She has also participated in competitive research environments, including quantum computing applications in portfolio optimization at YQuantum 2026, where she contributed to an award-winning project. Her experience reflects a strong interest in building scalable, real-world autonomous systems that bridge simulation and physical deployment.

In addition to her research, Fatima is a student leader and community builder. She is the founding president of Lafayette College’s Robotics Club, where she helps students engage with robotics from foundational Arduino projects to advanced ROS 2 systems. She is also the founder of IQRA, a nonprofit initiative that has supported digital literacy and economic empowerment for women in Pakistan. As a speaker and ambassador for programs like iCodeGuru and EnergyPath 2026, she actively shares her experiences in STEM, international education, and research, with a focus on increasing access to technology and encouraging more women to enter engineering and robotics fields.