2021 Speakers
Dr. Carlotta A. Berry
Dr. Carlotta A. Berry is professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She is also the Lawrence J. Giacoletto Endowed Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was named one of thirty women in robotics you need to know in 2020. Berry is passionate about diversifying STEM and recruiting more women to engineering. She is co-founder of the Rose building undergraduate diversity program, Black In Engineering and Black In Robotics. She was recently awarded the TechPoint Foundation for Youth Bridge Builder Award and named an American Society of Engineering Education Fellow.
Dr. Misty Davies
Dr. Misty Davies is the Deputy Project Manager for the System-Wide Safety Project in the NASA Airspace Operations and Safety Program. The System-Wide Safety Project has a goal to explore, discover, and understand how safety could be affected by the growing complexity of advanced aviation systems. Dr. Davies previously was a researcher focused on predicting the behavior of complex, engineered systems early in design as a way to improve these systems' safety, reliability, performance, and cost. She has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s Degree in Aerospace and Astrospace Engineering from Stanford University. She is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Dr. Aleksandra Faust
Aleksandra Faust is a Staff Research Scientist and Reinforcement Learning research team co-founder at Google Brain Research. Previously, Aleksandra founded and led Task and Motion Planning research in Robotics at Google, machine learning for self-driving car planning and controls in Waymo, and was a senior researcher in Sandia National Laboratories. She earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (with distinction), and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include learning for safe and scalable reinforcement learning, learning to learn, motion planning, decision-making, and robot behavior. Aleksandra won IEEE RAS Early Career Award for Industry, the Tom L. Popejoy Award for the best doctoral dissertation at the University of New Mexico in the period of 2011-2014, and was named Distinguished Alumna by the University of New Mexico School of Engineering. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, PC Magazine, ZdNet, VentureBeat, and was awarded Best Paper in Service Robotics at ICRA 2018, Best Paper in Reinforcement Learning for Real Life (RL4RL) at ICML 2019, and Best Paper of IEEE Computer Architecture Letters in 2020.
Dr. Dennice F. Gayme
Dennice F. Gayme is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Carol Croft Linde Faculty Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University. She earned her B. Eng. & Society from McMaster University in 1997 and an M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, both in Mechanical Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems in 2010 from the California Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in modeling, analysis, and control for spatially distributed and large-scale networked systems in applications such as wall-bounded turbulent flows, wind farms, and power grids. She was a recipient of the JHU Catalyst Award in 2015, ONR Young Investigator and NSF CAREER awards in 2017, a JHU Discovery Award in 2019, and a Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, 2020.
Dr. Edward Jimenez
Dr. Edward Jimenez is an Optical Engineer and Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he conducts research in various aspects of Non-Destructive Evaluation Techniques for X-ray Computed Tomography. Currently, Dr. Jimenez is investigating and developing Hyperspectral X-Ray Computed Tomography for Industrial and Security based applications. Specifically, Dr. Jimenez is leveraging Hyperspectral CT to improve image quality as well as to perform material identification of the interrogated object with a fidelity that greatly surpasses the current state of the art.
Dr. Elebeoba E. May
Elebeoba E. May, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering and an Associate Affiliate Member of the Department of Pathology and Genomic Medicine at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, and previously served as a Program Director in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences within the NSF Biological Sciences Directorate. Dr. May earned her Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University and prior to joining the University of Houston held an appointment as a Principal Member Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. As director of the Multi-scale Immunobiology Design, Algorithms, and Simulation (MIDAS) Lab, her research focuses on the design of integrated quantitative and empirical platforms for the development of multi-scale, predictive models of biological and biomolecular systems with an emphasis on host-pathogen interactions, microbial communities, and genetic information processing.
Dr. Edward Tunstel
Dr. Eddie Tunstel is CTO of Motiv Space Systems, Inc., a space and ground robotics company. He was recently Associate Director for Robotics at Raytheon Technologies Research Center leading a research group developing technologies to enable robotic autonomy and human-collaborative capabilities for manufacturing and service applications. He joined Raytheon Technologies in 2017 after 10 years at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) as a Senior Roboticist in its Intelligent Systems Center and as Space Robotics & Autonomous Control Lead in its Space Department. At APL he was involved in modular open systems architecture development efforts supporting advanced bomb disposal robotic systems programs as well as robotics and autonomy research for future national security and space applications. Prior to APL he was with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 18 years as a Senior Robotics Engineer and Group Leader of its Advanced Robotic Controls Group. He worked on the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers mission as both a flight systems engineer responsible for autonomous navigation and associated V&V, and as rover engineering team lead for rover mobility and robotic arm subsystems during surface mission operations on Mars. He earned B.S. and M.E. degrees in mechanical engineering from Howard University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from The University of New Mexico. He is a Fellow of IEEE with over 170 technical publications in his research interest areas.
