UNM Engineering Ph.D. student wins LANL Best Student Award
September 25, 2026
Shaifalee Saxena, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Best Student Award. She was one of five recipients out of approximately 2000 student workers.
Saxena began working as a graduate research assistant with Alexander Scheinker, Ph.D., at LANL in July 2025. Her research focuses on combining reinforcement learning with adaptive controls to help complex systems operate reliably as conditions change. The work has applications in particle accelerator tuning and robotic manipulation.
“I study how these systems can adapt to conditions they were not trained for and how to identify when a learned controller needs support from an adaptive control method,” she said.
Her work at LANL has helped her connect theoretical foundations of her doctoral research with real-world challenges.
“It has taught me to think beyond whether a method works in an ideal setting and consider how it performs under uncertainty and changing conditions,” Saxena said. “Collaborating with researchers across disciplines has also strengthened my ability to develop research questions, design experiments, and communicate my findings.”
The research has led to accepted papers at the 2026 American Control Conference, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Saxena also received the LANL SPOT Award recognizing contributions to an innovative research proposal and deep reinforcement learning research for her work accepted at the ICML 2026 RLxF Workshop earlier this year.
The recognitions are particularly meaningful to Saxena because they reflect her growth as a researcher and the support she’s received along the way, she said.
“I’m grateful to my LANL mentor, Dr. Alexander Scheinker, and my UNM advisor, Dr. Rafael Fierro, for their guidance and encouragement,” Saxena said. “Being part of both UNM and LANL has allowed me to connect my doctoral research with practical scientific and engineering challenges.”
