Gavriel State is a Senior Director for Simulation and AI at NVIDIA, where State leads the team building the Isaac Sim robotics simulator and Isaac Lab for reinforcement learning and sim-to-real robot transfer. State's work also covers real-to-sim 3D reconstruction, including rendering technologies such as 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing, and synthetic data generation with Omniverse Replicator. State co-authored the 2021 Isaac Gym paper on GPU-based physics simulation for robot learning, the 2023 Orbit paper on the framework Isaac Lab grew out of, and the 2025 Isaac Lab technical report. Before NVIDIA, State founded TransGaming Inc. and spent 15 years on games and rendering technologies.123456
At a glance
- Current role
- Senior Director for Simulation and AI
- Company
- NVIDIA
- Sector
- Company
- Fields
- Robotics, Reinforcement learning
- Work listed
- 3
- Sources cited
- 9
- Profile reviewed
Career
State founded TransGaming Inc. and spent 15 years on games and rendering technologies before NVIDIA. An earlier NVIDIA author page describes State as a Senior Director, System Software, leading work on applications of AI to gaming and on remastering games for the SHIELD TV platform. In a December 2020 NVIDIA blog post, State wrote about how GPUs can make deep reinforcement learning for robotics more accessible.2
NVIDIA's developer blog now lists State as Senior Director for Simulation and AI, leading the team behind the Isaac Sim robotics simulator and Isaac Lab. That work extends to real-to-sim 3D reconstruction, including 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing, and to synthetic data generation with Omniverse Replicator.1
Robotics simulation
State co-authored the 2021 Isaac Gym paper, which ran physics simulation and policy training on the GPU for robot learning, and the 2023 Orbit paper describing a unified framework for interactive robot learning environments. Orbit grew into Isaac Lab, whose November 2025 technical report State also co-authored; the BSD-3-Clause Isaac Lab repository lists State among its developers and contributors.34568
In March 2025 State announced Newton, an open-source, extensible physics engine for robotics simulation built on NVIDIA Warp and developed by NVIDIA with Google DeepMind and Disney Research.9
Work and contributions
NVIDIA Isaac Lab Open-source code
Leads the NVIDIA team building Isaac Lab, according to NVIDIA's developer blog; co-author of the Isaac Lab technical report (arXiv, November 2025) and listed under Acknowledgements in the BSD-3-Clause repository's CONTRIBUTORS file.1586
Isaac Gym and Orbit Published research
Co-author of "Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning" (2021) and "Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments" (2023); the Isaac Lab README says Isaac Lab development started from Orbit.346
Newton physics engine Open-source code
Co-wrote, with Spencer Huang and Miles Macklin, NVIDIA's March 2025 developer blog post announcing Newton, an open-source physics engine for robotics simulation.91
Timeline
- Wrote an NVIDIA blog post on how GPUs can make deep reinforcement learning for robotics more accessible.2
- Co-authored the Isaac Gym paper on GPU-based physics simulation for robot learning.3
- Co-authored the Orbit paper on a unified simulation framework for interactive robot learning.4
- Announced Newton, an open-source physics engine for robotics simulation, on the NVIDIA developer blog.9
- Co-authored the Isaac Lab technical report on GPU-accelerated simulation for multi-modal robot learning.5
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.
- Founder, TransGaming Inc.2
Where they work
- NVIDIA 43 people in the wiki
Related people
- Alexander AminiAlso at NVIDIA
- Dieter FoxAlso at NVIDIA
- Ming-Yu LiuAlso at NVIDIA
- Jim FanAlso at NVIDIA
- Rev LebaredianAlso at NVIDIA
- Tuomas HaarnojaReinforcement learning · Robotics
- Sergey LevineRobotics · Reinforcement learning
- Vikash KumarRobotics · Reinforcement learning
- Jonathan HurstRobotics · Reinforcement learning
- Pieter AbbeelRobotics · Reinforcement learning
Suggest a correction or removal
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References
9 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026
- Gavriel State — NVIDIA Technical Blog author page
- Gavriel State — NVIDIA Blog author page
- Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning (arXiv 2108.10470)
- Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments (arXiv 2301.04195)
- Isaac Lab: A GPU-Accelerated Simulation Framework for Multi-Modal Robot Learning (arXiv 2511.04831)
- isaac-sim/IsaacLab README (citation, acknowledgement) and LICENSE (BSD-3-Clause)
- gavrielstate (Gavriel State) — GitHub profile
- isaac-sim/IsaacLab CONTRIBUTORS.md
- Announcing Newton, an Open-Source Physics Engine for Robotics Simulation