Emmanuella Ametsi

I'm an Industrial PhD student jointly at Volvo Cars and Chalmers University of Technology, researching safety in autonomous driving with a focus on runtime monitoring and out-of-distribution detection.

My path here was anything but linear. I started as a lover of design — drawn to how technology shapes human experience. That curiosity led me to study Computer Science at the University of Ghana, then Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon University as a MasterCard Foundation Scholar, where I initially planned to pivot into HCI.

A summer at EPFL's Mathis Lab — building ML-powered tools for neurological patient assessments — showed me how deeply software can affect real lives. A role at Volvo Cars then pulled me into the automotive world, and I never looked back. Today I'm working on one of the hardest open problems in AV safety: detecting when a perception system is about to fail, before it does.