Speakers

Hiro Ono

Georgia Institute of Technology

Hiro Ono in an incoming professor at Georgia Tech. He previously served as the Group Supervisor of the Robotic Mobility Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and PI of the EELS project to create a highly versatile and intelligent robot for exploring unknown environments such as Enceladus vents. As a member of the Mars 2020 Rover (M2020) Mission, he supported tactical robotic operations. He developed M2020’s autonomous driving algorithm and also led the landing site traversability analysis. His research interest is centered around the application of robotic autonomy to space exploration, with an emphasis on machine learning applications to perception, data interpretation, and risk-aware decision-making. Before joining JPL in 2013, he was an assistant professor at Keio University in Japan. He graduated from MIT with PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2012. A father of a rebellious princess and a mischievous munchkin. Go Red Sox and Hanshin Tigers.

Brian Williams

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Brian Williams is a professor at MIT whose research focuses on model-based autonomy: enabling robots to plan, collaborate, diagnose problems, and adapt during long missions. His work spans risk-aware decision-making and robotic exploration under the sea, on land, and in space. He co-invented NASA’s Remote Agent system, which demonstrated autonomous, self-repairing spacecraft control aboard Deep Space One. His current research explores how teams of robots can work together in challenging environments and make reliable decisions under uncertainty.

Zhenzhen Li

NVIDIA

Zhenzhen Li is a research architect and scientist at NVIDIA, where she supports the Higher Education and Research community. Her work focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence, robotics, world models, and agentic AI, with interests in translating emerging research into scalable systems and fostering collaborations between academia and industry. Prior to joining NVIDIA, she was an AI Research Scientist at Bosch Research and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computing + Mathematical Sciences Department at Caltech. She received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Tom Nordheim

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL)

Dr. Tom A. Nordheim is a Section Manager and a member of the Senior Professional Staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. His research bridges the gap between planetary science and extreme-environment robotics, focusing on the exploration of ocean worlds in our Solar System. He is on the science team for the NASA Europa Clipper mission, currently en route to investigate the potential habitability of Jupiter’s moon Europa and its subsurface ocean, and is the deputy principal investigator for the SELINE investigation, which will investigate potential hazardous radiation on the lunar surface in preparation for astronauts. Formerly, he was a Research Scientist and the Deputy Director of the Ocean Worlds Laboratory at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped develop novel mission concepts for future exploration of Europa and Neptune's moon Triton. While there, he also worked on novel submersible robotic platforms designed to explore subglacial lakes in Antarctica and frozen lake environments in the High Arctic, which serve as analogs for accessing the deep oceans of icy moons like Europa and Enceladus. He earned his Ph.D. in Space Physics from University College London and holds a B.Sc. in Space Science and Robotics from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Richard Camilli

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)

Richard Camilli is a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Deep Submergence Laboratory. Dr. Camilli received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003 and maintains a research affiliation with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His work focuses on developing and using autonomous robotic systems for oceanography, archaeology, disaster response, and space exploration. He is a Leopold Leadership Fellow and National Science Foundation Career Award recipient. Camilli has served on over 50 oceanographic expeditions and several dozen human occupied submersible and saturation diving missions throughout the world.

Nare Karapetyan

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)

Nare is a Tenure Track Assistant Scientist and MIT-WHOI JP faculty at Woods Hole Oceanographic institution (WHOI). Her research focuses on planning and exploration problems with heterogeneous multi-agent systems, with applications in the aquatic domain. Nare was a postdoctoral associate at Maryland Robotics Center at University of Maryland (UMD). She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of South Carolina (USC). She was named Breakthrough Graduate Scholar 2022 by the USC and was an RSS Pioneers 2023. Since 2022, she is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the RA-L, IROS and ICRA Editorial Boards.

Justin Lawrence

Honeybee Robotics

Justin Lawrence is a Principal Investigator at Honeybee Robotics focused on developing autonomous rovers to support NASA missions to the Moon in 2028 and 2030. He also leads a NASA-selected program to develop commercial rovers for Mars. Before Honeybee, he earned his Ph.D. in planetary science at Georgia Tech as a NASA graduate fellow. There he helped design, build, and operate Icefin underwater robots across multiple polar expeditions and beneath ice shelves up to 700 m thick as analogs for Europa and Enceladus.

Kazuya Yoshida

Tohoku University

Kazuya Yoshida is Professor Emeritus and Head of the Space Robotics Laboratory at Tohoku University. His research focuses on the dynamics and control of space robots, from free-flying systems to planetary rovers. He has contributed to projects including the ETS-VII robotic satellite, the Hayabusa asteroid sample-return mission, and the Hakuto lunar rover. His work connects robotic design and control with the challenges of exploring space.

Jake Strang

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL)

Jake Strang is a software and space systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He is currently the Science Operations Center lead for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, and the command software engineer and member of the operations team for the Europa Imaging System on the Europa Clipper mission. He has developed control and data capture systems for calibration and aircraft flight testing campaigns of imagers for Earth science and planetary science applications, as well as science data processing pipelines. Jake received a B.A. in math from Washington University in St. Louis, and a M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, where he is now on faculty teaching in the same graduate program.

David Wettergreen

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

David Wettergreen creates exploration robots and deploys them in polar regions, deserts, underwater caverns, and volcanic craters. He has led numerous research projects, including robotic investigation of microbial life in the Atacama Desert that demonstrated autonomous science traverses of multiple kilometers. His work in science autonomy enables robots to detect, classify, and evaluate geologic and biologic features, then interpret and act on what they observe. This work supports space exploration as well as agriculture, forestry, ecology, and marine science. Dr. Wettergreen is a Research Professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the Robotics Ph.D. program. He has advised 52 graduate students, including 18 doctoral students, and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. He received a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon in 1995, conducted postdoctoral research at NASA Ames Research Center (1996–97), and was a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (1998–2000). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers.

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