Professor Dr. Naomi Leonard

Biography

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University, where she also serves as the Chair on leave. She is associated with multiple programs, including Applied Computational Mathematics and the Biophysics Graduate Program, and affiliated with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. Leonard is the founding director of creativeX, Princeton's engineering-and-the-arts collective, and the founding editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Her research emphasizes dynamics, control, and learning in multi-agent systems, particularly in the contexts of multi-robot teams and collective animal behavior. She has received numerous accolades, including the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Award and the 2024 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, and is a MacArthur Fellow. Leonard holds a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland.

Research Interests

Awards