Title/Position Professor of Robotics

Degree Ph. D., MIT, 2001

Contact

rn1627@princeton.edu
F316 Engineering Quadrangle
Homepage

Faculty Assistant

Emma Kruse
ek12@princeton.edu

Research Areas

Control, Robotics and Dynamical Systems

Short Bio

?I am a Professor in?Robotics at Princeton University, joint between the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science (2022-present). Prior to joining Princeton I was the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and?a founding Faculty Member of the?Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.?Before becoming faculty, I spent a year as a Research Fellow in the?Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. I received my PhD and was a Postdoc Lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL)?supported by the Bell Labs GRPW Fellowship (1995-2001).
I am grateful to have received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010), Radcliffe Fellowship (2012), and be an invited TED Speaker (2017), a AAAI Fellow (2020) and an ACM Fellow (2020). In 2014, I was chosen for the?Nature 10 Award, given to the top ten influential scientists and engineers?by the journal?Nature?(Dec 2014). In 2017, I co-founded?ROOT Robotics, an educational?robotics company aimed at democratizing coding, AI, and robotics through early education; Root was acquired by iRobot (2019). Our lab's Kilobots have also been commercialized by?K-Team Inc?and over 8000 robots have been sold worldwide. I was an Amazon Scholar (2020-21), working on algorithms for warehouse multi-robot systems.
?I am also the author of a popular Scientific American blog article on tenure-track life?(The Awesomest 7-year Postdoc), the founding advisor for the?Harvard Women-in-CS Club (WiCS), a founding ally member of the?Black-in-Robotics Boston Chapter (BiR), and an advocate for a?nurturing culture and gender/racial equity in academia and STEM. I am honored to have received the?McDonald Mentoring Award, and to have a large network of mentees and peers who care about these same issues.?I work on many diversity and equity issues within Robotics/CS/Academia; you can read more about this on my?Activism?page.?