Theodore P. Pavlic

Theodore P. Pavlic is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University with joint appointments in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence and the School of Life Sciences. His research sits at the intersection of intelligent control, behavioral ecology, optimization, and game theory, with a focus on understanding and designing collective behavior in both biological and artificial systems. He studies how simple rules and incentives scale to complex group-level outcomes, drawing inspiration from social insects and animal collectives to inform swarm robotics, distributed control, and reinforcement learning. His work also addresses experimental design and statistical rigor in behavioral studies, as well as interpretable and debiased machine learning frameworks that connect cognition, perception, and control. Pavlic’s research appears in venues spanning behavioral ecology, robotics, machine learning, and applied mathematics, reflecting a strongly interdisciplinary approach to modeling, analyzing, and engineering intelligent multi-agent systems.