The very idea that engineering and the arts are posed as opposites creates conflict where none should exist. Breaking those barriers allows me and those I teach and collaborate with to fully express our potential as humans and create beauty in the world through technology.
Radhika Nagpal is an engineer whose research spans robotics, AI, and biology, with an emphasis on how collective intelligence can be understood in nature and engineered in robotic systems. Projects from her lab include the Kilobots, a swarm of 1,000 robots inspired by cells; Blueswarm underwater robots inspired by fish; and models of the biological collective intelligence found in ants.
In 2017, Radhika co-founded Root Robotics, an educational robotics company aimed at broadening participation in AI and robotics through early education. A passionate science culture activist, she received widespread praise for her Scientific American blog article from 2013, “The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life,” advocating cultural change in academia. In 2014, she was honored with the annual Nature 10 Award from the journal Nature, recognizing 10 influential scientists and engineers, and in 2017, she was an invited TED speaker.
Radhika is the Norman R. Augustine Professor in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton University. She works between the departments, leading the Self-organizing Swarms and Robotics Group (SSR). Before joining Princeton, Radhika 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.
