Success Stories: A German Postdoctoral Fellow in Autonomous Systems and Robotics Wins NIW Approval, Thanks to Our Case Preparation Strategy

Case Summary:

When a postdoctoral fellow from Germany approached us for his National Interest Waiver approval, the first thing we did was try to navigate his academic and professional background and then sign the retainer agreement with him. In a matter of days, we had collected the following information for his petition:

• He was working in the field of autonomous systems and robotics, and his proposed endeavor was to work on his research on optimizing human-computer interaction by coupling multimodal data streams in order to advance the development of next-generation assistant robots that intuitively address the implicit and explicit needs of their human partners.
• His research endeavor was of great importance because it is improving the assistive technologies available to support disabled people. Moreover, the financial worth of the assistive robotics market is also rapidly growing, with the global market for assistive robots surpassing $8 billion within the next decade. His research optimizing assistive robotics has been crucial for the development of these technologies and the betterment of the lives of disabled people globally.
• More specifically, his proposed endeavor also has broad implications for the United States where automated robots are increasingly adopting to perform labor for a variety of industries, like automotive and food manufacturing.
• Due to its clear national importance, his research has been supported with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Honda Research Institute, and Intel.
• His knowledge and expertise in virtual reality, robotics, human-machine interactions, and deployed robot systems have led to his fame as a reliable researcher in the field which has led to him being regularly invited to conduct peer reviews for authoritative journals and conferences in the field, where he has completed at least 22 reviews to date.
• With this in mind, we also noted that his work in the field has resulted in 6 peer-reviewed conference papers (2 of them first-authored) and 1 peer-reviewed journal article.
• These publications have also been cited a total of 167 times according to Google Scholar, thereby demonstrating that these publications are widely recognized and relied upon in the field of autonomous systems and robotics.

And to tie all of this together we added that he has pursued research directly related to his proposed endeavor for 7 years. So when his approval came through we were very happy to have worked with him on the case. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors.