TII’s Jennifer Simonjan Turns Robotics into a Tool for Nature Restoration

Long before she set foot in the UAE, Jennifer Simonjan had already heard whispers of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII). It was 2018, and she was a visiting researcher at Georgia Tech when her professor mentioned that an ambitious advanced research center halfway across the world was being planned.

“At the time, it was just an idea,” she recalls. “But it stuck with me.”

Years later, after a whirlwind academic journey and a global pandemic, that idea would become a reality, and her next big leap.

Today, as research director at TII’s Autonomous Robotics Research Center, Simonjan leads the team working on network ed robotics, a field of robotics that focuses on connecting robots via networks to share data, coordinate actions, and enhance capabilities. At TII, she’s advancing robotics technologies aimed at making ecosystem restoration more scalable and efficient through her work with Nabat, an Abu Dhabi startup built on TII’s technology.

Born and raised in Austria, Simonjan grew up close to nature, spending her time skiing, hiking, and mountain biking.

But when it came time to choose a career, she turned toward technology, earning a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD all focused on electrical engineering and information communication technology, with a focus on distributed sensor networks.

After years studying and working abroad, including a postdoc at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Simonjan returned to Austria during the COVID-19 pandemic. There, she recalibrated her focus, joining a research center focused on swarm intelligence and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), while also co-founding a startup.

Then the seed of something bigger took root.

Simonjan reconnected with former colleagues who had joined TII, and soon she followed. Drawn by both the trusted network and the opportunity to apply robotics to real-world challenges, she became involved in a new initiative: deploying autonomous drones and utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to support ecosystem restoration, starting with mangrove reforestation in the UAE. This work eventually became Nabat.

“We started from scratch,” she says. “I knew nothing about mangroves. For the first two months, we were just reading and learning. What they need. How they grow.”

Today, the team at Nabat has created aerial, terrestrial, and underwater robotics systems that seed, map and monitor fragile ecosystems. Simonjan oversees the development of intuitive tools and platforms for real-world deployment, designed not just for engineers, but for environmental workers and communities.

Her story is one of unexpected harmonies, between robots and nature, and science and sustainability. After years spent immersed in technology. Simonjan finds herself reconnecting with her first passion of protecting the natural world she loved growing up. “It wasn’t my goal at university to save the environment,” she says. “But now, it feels like I have come full circle.”

The future she envisions is one where technology empowers people to achieve restoration work at a scale and speed previously unimaginable, amplifying human effort rather than replacing it.

“We’re scaling efforts,” she says. “What one person does in a day, our systems can do across thousands of hectares.”

Yet, amid all the technological progress and environmental purpose, she admits there’s one thing she sometimes misses: the mountains of Austria. But life in the UAE has opened new doors.

“I’ve discovered water sports, scuba diving especially,” she says. “It’s a different kind of outdoors, but it brings me the same peace.”

While the terrain may have changed, her bond with the natural world remains, only now it is as much about preserving it as it is about enjoying it.