Speakers

Confirmed Speakers

Laurie Leshin

Dr. Laurie Leshin is University Professor for Space Futures at Arizona State University (ASU), where she advises senior leadership on space, research, and higher education. She works closely with ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, the University Design Institute, the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, and others. She is a former Bren Professor of Geochemistry and Planetary Science at Caltech and a co-investigator for two instruments on NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover. From 2022 to 2025, she served as Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL), where she guided major missions in Earth science, planetary exploration, and astrophysics, and she continues. Prior to leading NASA JPL, Prof. Leshin held a number of senior positions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, including Director of Science, Deputy Director of Science and Technology, and Deputy Associate Administrator of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, overseeing future human spaceflight. She has also served as President of Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Dean of the School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her honors include NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal and Distinguished Public Service Medal. The International Astronomical Union named asteroid 4922 Leshin to recognize her contribution to planetary science.

Hiro Ono

Dr. Masahiro (Hiro) Ono joined Georgia Tech’s Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering as an Associate Professor in July 2026, after more than a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . At JPL, he served as a Research Technologist and Group Supervisor of the Robotic Surface Mobility Group, leading the $15M EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) project to develop a snake-like robot for exploring Enceladus’s subsurface ocean . He also led the MAARS project on autonomous rover systems and contributed to the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, where he developed enhanced autonomous driving and led traversability analysis for landing site selection . He received JPL’s 2021 Software of the Year Award for his ML-based terrain classifier and led the AI4Mars crowdsourcing initiative with ~17,000 volunteers. He holds a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT.

Blake Hannaford

Before graduate study, Blake Hannaford held engineering positions in digital hardware and software design, office automation and medical image processing. At Berkeley he pursued thesis research in multiple target tracking in medical images and the control of time-optimal voluntary human movement. From 1986 to 1989 he worked on the remote control of robot manipulators in the Man-Machine Systems Group in the Automated Systems Section of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech. He supervised that group from 1988 to 1989. Since September 1989, he has been at the University of Washington in Seattle except for work at Google Life Sciences from 2014-15. He was awarded the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Early Career Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Hannaford’s currently active interests include haptic displays on the internet, surgical biomechanics and biologically based design of robot manipulators. He co-founded a spinout company, Applied Dexterity, in 2013.

Srikanth Saripalli

Dr. Srikanth Saripalli holds the J. Mike Walker ’66 Professorship in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A &M University, where he is the Director, Center for Autonomous Vehicles and Sensor Systems. Dr. Saripalli received his Ph.D. and Masters in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2003 and 2007 respectively, and his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences in 1999. After acquiring his Ph.D., Dr. Saripalli was a Member of Technical Staff at JPL where he was a member of the Robotic Software systems Group in the Mobility and Robotic Systems Section. His research interests include control of unmanned aerial vehicles, vision based control, visual serving and control of complex hybrid systems.

Matthew E. Taylor

Matthew E. Taylor (Matt) received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2008, supervised by Peter Stone. He then completed a two-year postdoctoral research position at the University of Southern California with Milind Tambe and spent 2.5 years as an assistant professor at Lafayette College. He was then an assistant professor at Washington State University where he held the Allred Distinguished Professorship in Artificial Intelligence. In 2017, he temporarily left academia to help start an artificial intelligence lab in Edmonton, Alberta, with Borealis AI, the artificial intelligence research lab for the Royal Bank of Canada. He is now a tenured associate professor in computer science at the University of Alberta, a Fellow-in-Residence at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and remains an adjunct professor at Washington State University. He has been a PI or co-PI on over $6M USD in competitively awarded research funding from federal, state, and industrial sources, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award.

Tapomayukh “Tapo” Bhattacharjee

Tapomayukh “Tapo” Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he directs the EmPRISE Lab (https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/). He completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology and was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His primary research interests are in the area of physical robot caregiving and physical human-robot interaction. He is the recipient of TRI Young Faculty Researcher Award’24, NSF CAREER Award’23, AFCEA 40 under 40 Award’22, and his work has won Best Systems Paper Award at HRI’26, Best Paper Award at RSS’25, Best Paper and Student Paper Award Finalist and Best HRI Paper Award Finalist at ICRA’25, Best Systems Paper Award Finalist at HRI’24, Best Demo Award at HRI’24, Best RoboCup Paper Award at IROS’22, Best Paper Award Finalist and ABB Best Student Paper Award Finalist at IROS’22, Best Technical Advances Paper Award at HRI’19, and Best Demonstration Award at NeurIPS’18. His work has also been featured in many media outlets including the BBC, Reuters, New York Times, IEEE Spectrum, and GeekWire and his robot-assisted feeding work was selected to be one of the best interactive designs of 2019 by Fast Company. 

Maira Saboia

Maira Saboia is a robotics technologist. She was a post-doctoral researcher at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) working with Dr. Amir Rahmani (2022), and Dr. Michael Wolf‬ (2019-2020), she was a visiting postdoc with the Team Costar led by Dr. Ali Agha while she was a post-doctoral researcher at Vale Institute of Technology (ITV) in Brazil under the supervision of Dr. Gustavo Pessin. She completed her Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA with Prof. Nils Napp, received her M.Sc. in Computer Scicence from the University of Campinas, Brazil working with Dr. Alexandre Xavier Falcão and her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Pernambuco, Brazil with Prof. Carlos Alexandre Barros de Mello

Keenan Albee

Keenan Albee is an Assistant Professor of Astronautical Engineering and of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. His research develops methods for adaptive decision-making under uncertainty for mobile robots, combining control theory, reinforcement learning, and stochastic modeling with an emphasis on hardware validation—his work has flown on the International Space Station and is headed to the Moon. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University.