Girish Chowdhary

Biography

Dr. Girish Chowdhary is an associate professor and Donald Biggar Willet Faculty Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the director of the Field Robotics Engineering and Science Hub (FRESH) at UIUC and the Chief Scientist on the Illinois Autonomous Farm. Girish holds a joint appointment with Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Computer Science, is a member of the UIUC Coordinated Science Lab, and holds affiliate appointments in Aerospace Engineering and Electrical Engineering. He holds a PhD (2010) from Georgia Institute of Technology in Aerospace Engineering, was a postdoc at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011-2013), and an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University (2013-2016). He also worked with the German Aerospace Center's (DLR's) Institute of Flight Systems for around three years (2003-2006). Girish’s work on AI and adaptive flight control has led to several key advances to flight control and a Dave Ward memorial award by Aerospace Guidance and Controls committee. Girish is the author of over 100 publications in adaptive control, autonomy, and robotics, and PI on NSF, AFOSR, NASA, ARPA-E, and DOE grants, and an ONR MURI. He is the winner of the Air Force Young Investigator Award, and several best paper awards, including a best systems paper award at RSS 2018 for his recent work on the agricultural robot TerraSentia. He is the co-founder of EarthSense Inc. (www.earthsense.co), working towards making sustainable farming profitable with ultralight field robots.