John Leonard is the Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is also a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots. He holds the degrees of BSEE in electrical engineering and science from the University of Pennsylvania and DPhil in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford. Leonard was team leader for MIT’s DARPA Urban Challenge team, which was one of eleven teams to qualify for the Urban Challenge final event and one of six teams to complete the race. He is the recipient of an National Science Foundation Career Award and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and as area head for Ocean Science and Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.
