profile_image.JPG
Moritz Zoellner
Grad Student @ Purdue CS

zoellner[at]purdue[dot]edu

I am a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, where my research is supervised by Prof. Rohan Paleja in the SCALE Robotics Lab. I am grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for generously funding my master’s studies in the United States.

This summer, I am at the University of Oxford for a research visit with Prof. Ioannis Havoutis in the Dynamic Robot Systems Group at the Oxford Robotics Institute.

In 2025, I completed my bachelor’s degree in computer science at Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, where I was honored for graduating top of my class and received multiple awards for my bachelor’s thesis. As part of the degree program, I worked as a part-time software engineer at Deutsche Telekom for three years and wrote my thesis at Carl Zeiss Microscopy during a six-month R&D internship.

research

I am broadly interested in robot learning and embodied AI, especially the long-term goal of building generalist robots that solve complex tasks by learning from humans, improving through experience, and understanding the physical world.

publications

2026

  1. Under Submission
    hint2_image.png
    hint2: Hierarchical World Models for Inference-Time Temporal Logic Guidance
    Moritz Zoellner, Anastasios Manganaris, Ahmed Qureshi, and Rohan Paleja
    Under Submission, 2026
    website
  2. ICRA
    icra2026_workshop.png
    Temporal Logic Guidance for Action-Only Diffusion Policies with World Models
    Moritz Zoellner, Anastasios Manganaris, and Rohan Paleja
    ICRA Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Robot Learning and Human-Robot Interaction, 2026
    paper poster workshop

2025

  1. DELFI
    pyrope.png
    PyRope: A Code-Based Approach for E-Assessment in STEM Subjects
    Original title: PyRope–Ein codebasierter Ansatz für E-Assessment in MINT-Fächern
    Konrad Schöbel, Jochen Merker, Paul Brassel, Moritz Zoellner, and Heike Hain
    23rd Educational Technologies Conference of the German Informatics Society (DELFI), 2025
    paper website code

more

Awards

In 2025, I was awarded a scholarship for a master’s degree in the United States by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The scholarship covers tuition and living expenses at Purdue University over a two-year period.

When I graduated from Leipzig University of Applied Sciences in 2025, I received an award for graduating top of my class and an award for the best bachelor’s thesis. In 2026, I also received an Applied Digitalization thesis award from Actemium Deutschland for my bachelor’s thesis.

Before my university studies, I attended a selective STEM-focused high school in Jena, Germany. Upon graduating with distinction in 2021, I received multiple awards, including an outstanding graduate award from the German Physical Society.

Service

I serve as a student co-chair of the Technical Committee on Robot Learning of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Teaching

In Spring 2026, I was a graduate teaching assistant for the course AI Essentials: A Non-Technical Introduction (GRAD 503) in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University.

At Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, I was an undergraduate teaching assistant for three semesters (2023-2024), where I developed exercises for new courses in mathematics and computer science that are now part of the degree program’s curriculum. Additionally, as a research associate for one semester (2025), I contributed to PyRope, a Python package that helps university instructors create digital STEM exercises with integrated assessment.