About
I came to engineering through making things, and stayed for the machines.
I'm VP of Operations at Trener Robotics, where I deploy AI-enabled automation into the field, usually machine shops. I work mostly with industrial robots, and I've worked with quadrupeds and mobile robotic platforms along the way.
How I got here
I studied business administration at Cornell, industrial design at RISD, and computer science at Georgia Tech. What connects them is that I'm a hands-on learner: theory doesn't stick for me until it's attached to a physical thing.
While I was studying how objects actually get made, I got obsessed with virtuosity: with becoming machine-like, and with what happens when you try to scale that. For me that meant glass. Years of glassblowing, casting, and cutting, working like a machine to get the hand right. CNC machining brought me full circle, back to what my family had been doing all along, and the obsession moved with it. What holds my attention now is manufacturing processes, optimizing production, and robotics. A design practice had turned into an engineering one. Form follows function, and function gets decided on the shop floor.
My grandparents owned Stanko Products, a machine shop founded in 1965. What's foundational tends to pull you back. Watching that work up close is what convinced me automation was worth doing. Not to take people out of shops, but to keep those shops open.
Now
Each step has widened the frame. Manufacturing led me to optimizing the processes around it, optimizing processes led to building and leading the teams doing the work, and that led here: building a company that puts genuinely new technology into the field, where it has to hold up in real production.
Physical AI and perception have moved fast in the last few years. I'm working out how to use that to put automation within reach of shops that could never afford a full integration. That's why I'm at Trener.
Work
- VP of Operations, Trener Robotics. Present.
- Principal Research & Design Engineer, Autodesk Research, Boston and San Francisco. 2017–2025. Led robotics deployment and strategy for internal and external research. Applications spanned assembly, additive, milling, welding and material handling, delivered through research programs, customer projects, consulting, and a startup accelerator. Collaborations included Dar, Skanska, AI SpaceFactory and Apis Cor.
- Faculty, Rhode Island School of Design. 2010–2017. Taught digital fabrication, robotics, and computational design across Experimental & Foundation Studies, Fine Art, and Architecture & Design.
Writing & research
- Text to Robotic Assembly of Multi-Component Objects using 3D Generative AI and Vision Language Models Co-author. NeurIPS 2025, Creative AI Track.
- MARSHA, MARSHA, MARSHA: How We Helped AI SpaceFactory Win NASA's 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge Autodesk News, May 2019.
- Reimagining Possible with the Technology Centers at Autodesk University 2020.
- A Contactless Multi-Modal Sensing Approach for Material Assessment and Recovery in Building Deconstruction Co-author. Sustainability 17(2), 585, 2025. Thermal, RGB and depth sensing with machine learning to assess in-situ materials for reuse, demonstrated on drywall deconstruction.
Speaking & teaching
- Learn the Rules, Then Break Them: Fusion 360 for Industrial Robot Arms Instructional lab, Autodesk University 2020. Posting native robot code out of Fusion 360, validating it in RobotStudio, and calibrating tool and work coordinate systems on a real arm.
- Robots in the Built Environment: Workflows for AEC at the Autodesk Technology Centers Autodesk University 2019. Case studies from the Technology Centers, across Maya, Machina, RobotStudio and PowerMill.
- DCL Talks Digital Craft Lab, California College of the Arts, 2016.
- Seven years teaching digital fabrication, robotics, and computational design at RISD.
Elsewhere written about
- Research Conversations with Stefanie Pender Autodesk Research.
- Stefanie Pender teaches a robot the art of glassmaking Designboom, 2017.
Education
- M.S. Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
- M.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design
- B.S. Business Administration, Cornell University
Things I'm good at
- Deploying robots into real production environments, not demos
- ABB industrial robots and Universal Robots: RobotStudio, certified for material handling, SafeMove / SafeMove2 certified
- PLC programming (Rockwell Automation) and mobile robotic platforms
- CNC machines and digital fabrication, from CAD through toolpath to part
- Workcell design, risk assessment, and safety certification
- Translating between shop floor, engineering, and leadership
Outside the shop
Mountains, and a small opinionated dog.
Elsewhere
- stefpender (at) gmail.com
- linkedin.com/in/stefanie-pender