Ye Zhao is an Assistant Professor at The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is affiliated with The Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Agile Robotics Lab, Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2016, where he also obtained the UT Robotics Portfolio degree and was a member of the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory. He received his bachelor degree from Control Science and Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in 2011.

His research interests lie broadly in planning, control, and optimization algorithms of highly dynamic, contact-rich, and human-centered robots. Specific topics include robust motion planning and optimization of locomotion and manipulation, temporal logic task planning of whole-body locomotion in unstructured environments, whole-body operational space control, distributed impedance control of series elastic actuators. He is especially interested in challenging locomotion and manipulation problems with formal guarantees on robustness, agility, real-time, and autonomy.

Dr. Zhao serves as an ICT Chair of 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, a Co-Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Student Activities Committee in 2016, and a Committee Member of IEEE-RAS Member Activities Board in 2016. Ye's co-authored work has been recognized as the 2017 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Paper and 2016 IEEE-RAS best whole-body control paper and video award finalist. He is also a Review Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI: Humanoid Robotics, an Associate Editor of international robotics conferences including IROS, Humanoids, and ARSO, and a Committee Member of several IEEE-RAS Technical Committees (TCs) including TC on Whole-Body Control and TC on Model-based Optimization for Robotics.