Radhika Nagpal

Radhika Nagpal is a Professor in Robotics at Princeton University, joint between the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science (2022-present). Prior to joining Princeton, she 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. Before becoming faculty, she spent a year as a Research Fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Nagpal received her PhD and was a Postdoc Lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) supported by the Bell Labs GRPW Fellowship (1995-2001).

Nagpal received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010), Radcliffe Fellowship (2012), and was an invited TED Speaker (2017), a AAAI Fellow (2020) and an ACM Fellow (2020). In 2014, she was chosen for the Nature 10 Award, given to the top ten influential scientists and engineers by the journal Nature (Dec 2014). In 2017, she co-founded ROOT Robotics, an educational robotics company aimed at democratizing coding, AI, and robotics through early education; Root was acquired by iRobot (2019). Her lab's Kilobots have also been commercialized by K-Team Inc and over 8000 robots have been sold worldwide. She was an Amazon Scholar (2020-21), working on algorithms for warehouse multi-robot systems.

Nagpal is also the author of a popular Scientific American blog article on tenure-track life (The Awesomest 7-year Postdoc), the founding advisor for the Harvard Women-in-CS Club (WiCS), a founding ally member of the Black-in-Robotics Boston Chapter (BiR), and the current faculty advisor for the Princeton NSBE Chapter. She has received the McDonald Mentoring Award, and has a large network of mentees and peers who care about these same issues. She works on many diversity and equity issues within Robotics/CS/Academia.