Veronica Muriga

I’m a 3rd year PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at CMU. I work with Prof. Swarun Kumar, Prof. Akshitha Sriraman, and Prof. Assane Gueye on satellite communications and connectivity for communities that need it most.

My research is part of CMU’s Moonshot Initiative to bring communication and compute to underserved and resource-constrained communities around the world. I’m drawn to problems where the technology already exists but the will — or the system design — to make it universally accessible does not. A lot of my work asks: what can we build on top of existing infrastructure, without requiring communities to wait for something new to be built for them?

One project I’m especially excited about is Ishara, an emergency alert system that uses existing Starlink satellites to reach people in areas with no cellular coverage. I’ve had the privilege of evaluating this system in both Pittsburgh and Rwanda, which has shaped how I think about building for real-world conditions rather than ideal ones. I also work on making regulatory systems less intimidating, through building LLM-based tools that achieve substantially higher accuracy than off-the-shelf models on compliance and contradiction-detection tasks. I got my M.Eng. and B.S. from MIT, and my undergrad and Master’s research was on using RL for robot navigation using semantic scene graphs as input.

I am from Nairobi, Kenya, and community engagement has always felt inseparable from the research I do. I serve on the board of the MIT Africa Impact Fund, volunteer with MIT undergraduate admissions, and spend time with community organizations here in Pittsburgh.