Nishant Kheterpal
nskh@umich.edu
CV  | 

Hi! I'm Nishant.

I'm a PhD candidate in Robotics at the University of Michigan, advised by Jean-Baptiste Jeannin. My research concerns applied formal methods, in the domains of safety-critical systems, proof automation, and education.

I'm passionate about teaching computer science, robotics, and data science, with eleven terms of teaching experience across three institutions. Over Summer 2024, I taught two introductory courses at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego as instructor of record. Previously, I earned a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and spent two years working in self-driving.
I am on the job market for teaching-track faculty positions beginning Fall 2026.

Teaching

Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego

Instructor of Record - DSC 10 Summer Session I 2024
Instructor of Record - DSC 40A Summer Session II 2024

University of Michigan

Lead Graduate Student Instructor - EECS 280 Winter 2024, Fall 2025
Quiz lead in Fall 2025
Head Graduate Student Instructor - Practical Data Science (EECS 398-003) Fall 2024
Finalist for College of Engineering Towner Prize for Outstanding GSIs
Guest Lecturer - EECS 590, Aero 552 Fall 2023, Winter 2024
Graduate Student Instructor - Robotics 599 Fall 2023

University of California, Berkeley

Data 8 - Undergraduate Student Instructor Fa16, Sp17, Fa17, Sp18, Fa18
Received Outstanding GSI Award (Top 9% of GSIs)

Publications

Nishant Kheterpal, J. Tanner Slagel, Elanor Tang, Serra Z. Dane, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, "Automatic Certification of the Active Corner Method for Collision Avoidance." Certified Programs and Proofs, 2026. (Under review)
Janine Tiefenbruck, Nishant Kheterpal, Suraj Rampure, "RISE and Shine: Teaching With Jupyter Notebooks in Real Time." Talk presented at JupyterCon, 2025.
Nishant Kheterpal, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, "Towards a study of performance for safe neural network training." Workshop on Formal Methods for ML-Enabled Autonomous Systems, CAV, 2023.
Nishant Kheterpal, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, "Towards a Formalization of the Active Corner Method for Collision Avoidance in PVS." Formal Techniques for Safety-Critical Systems, SPLASH, 2022.
Nishant Kheterpal, Elanor Tang, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, "Automating Geometric Proofs of Collision Avoidance with Active Corners." Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design, 2022. (40 accepted / 88 submissions)
Nishant Kheterpal, Eugene Vinitsky, Cathy Wu, Aboudy Kreidieh, Kathy Jang, Kanaad Parvate, Alexandre M. Bayen, "Flow: Open Source Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Control." Workshop on Machine Learning Open-Source Software, NeurIPS, 2018.
Eugene Vinitsky, Aboudy Kreidieh, Luc Le Flem, Nishant Kheterpal, Kathy Jang, Cathy Wu, Fangyu Wu, Richard Liaw, Eric Liang, Alexandre M. Bayen, "Benchmarks for Reinforcement Learning in Mixed-Autonomy Traffic." Conference on Robot Learning. 2018.
Nishant Kheterpal, Kanaad Parvate, Cathy Wu, Aboudy Kreidieh, Eugene Vinitsky, Alexandre M. Bayen, "Flow: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Control in SUMO", SUMO User Conference, 2018.
Cathy Wu, Kanaad Parvate, Nishant Kheterpal, Leah Dickstein, Ankur Mehta, Eugene Vinitsky, Alexandre M. Bayen, "Framework for Control and Deep Reinforcement Learning in Traffic." Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2017 IEEE 20th International Conference on. IEEE, 2017.

Education

University of Michigan

PhD in Robotics expected 2026
MS in Robotics 2022

University of California, Berkeley

BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences 2018

Media

Wired - "Autonomous Vehicles: The Answer to Our Growing Traffic Woes" August 2019
Wall Street Journal - "At Berkeley, It's Big Data on Campus" December 2018
Berkeley Engineering - "Turning Cars into Robot Traffic Managers" October 2018

Honors and Awards

Towner Prize for Outstanding GSIs, UM College of Engineering - Finalist 2025
Graduate Teacher Certificate, University of Michigan 2024
NASA Graduate Fellowship 2021-2023
UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award - Top 9% of GSIs 2018