Chad Jenkins Awarded NSF CAREER Grant

Jun 24 - Chad Jenkins is our latest faculty recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a highly selective grant that the National Science Foundation awards to junior faculty members who are likely to become academic leaders of the future.

The project funded by Chad’s CAREER grant aims to enable autonomous robots to learn decision making policies from multivalued demonstrations. Activities to be performed include:

* Creating standardized, accessible, and reproducible robot platforms (such as the $700 Brown SmURV platform);

* Developing transferable undergraduate autonomous robotics courses that build on the “control loop” as a unifying concept (similar to the “rendering pipeline” in graphics); and

* Establishing structured pathways for broad populations of society, from secondary schools to research groups, to engage in autonomous robotics.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

Besides his CAREER award, Chad has also received other prestigious recognitions, including a Sloan Research Fellowship and a PECASE award, an outstanding accomplishment.