My name is Nikhil Chavan-Dafle.
I was born in Kolhapur, a beautiful town in south western part of Maharashtra state, India.
I completed my schooling upto high school in Kolhapur.
For my undergraduate studies I joined College of Engineering Pune.
I majored in Mechanical Engineering and enjoyed working on mechanism design, product design and robotics projects.
After graduating from COEP in May 2011, I joined Eaton Corporation as an Associate Engineer.
I worked with hydraulic products division team and also collaborated with Eaton Innovation Center.
In January 2012, I received a fellowship to join the Center for Product Design and Manufacturing at Indian Institute of Science, Banglaore. I worked with Prof. B. Gurumoorthy to develop a medical equipment to transfer a patient from a bed to another bed or to an operating table. Using this device, a single operator can transfer a patient with minimal manual efforts.
In Fall 2012, I came to the US for a masters programs. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in December 2013 with Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering degree. While at CMU, I worked as a Graduate Student Researcher under the guidance of Prof. Matthew T. Mason at the Manipulation Lab (MLab) at Robotics Institute, CMU.
Now, I am a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and working with Prof. Alberto Rodriguez at the Mechanism and Manipulation Lab @ MIT (MCube Lab).