Mansi Maheshwari

I'm a PhD student at Mila studying Lifelong Machine Learning, co-advised by Prof. Sarath Chandar and Prof. Janarthanan Rajendran.

I moved from India to Seattle to pursue a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. After graduating, I spent two years building scalable systems as a Software Engineer at Nordstrom. While I loved the practical side of tech, I felt a pull towards research — to tackle fundamental, open-ended questions.

That realization brought me to pursue a Master's at UMass Amherst, where I fell in love with Reinforcement Learning. I had the privilege of conducting research at the Autonomous Learning Lab (founded by Turing Awardee Andy Barto) under Prof. Bruno Castro da Silva. Our work was published at CoLLAs 2025 and AAMAS 2026 (oral), and I distilled the core ideas for a broad audience in my Three Minute Thesis. I also got to share that passion with high school students by teaching Intro to AI at UW, and put it to work in the real world as an AI Research Intern building autonomous driverless tractors at CNH Industrial.

Now at Mila, co-advised by Prof. Sarath Chandar and Prof. Janarthanan Rajendran, my research focuses on developing lifelong systems that can continuously adapt and learn safely, often drawing inspiration from natural learning systems.

Instructor, Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence – University of Washington

Summer 2025, Spring 2026

Designed and taught an introductory AI course for high-school students.

Artificial Intelligence Subject Matter Expert – iCEV

September 2025 – present

Reviewed and developed curriculum content for the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence textbook for high-school learners.