Naomi Leonard

Biography

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, associated faculty in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and Director of the Council on Science and Technology at Princeton University. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the IEEE, SIAM, IFAC, and ASME. She received her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. Between degrees, she worked in the electric power industry. Her current research focuses on theory and application in multi-agent systems, mobile sensor networks, collective animal behavior, and human decision dynamics. She studies how network structure, heterogeneity of information, leadership, and nonlinearity determine robust and flexible collective dynamics, and she designs methodology for distributed control of multi-agent systems with provable performance. In collaboration with biologists, she examines the dynamics of human decision-making under uncertainty and explores mechanisms that explain the inspiring dynamics of animal groups, including fish, honeybees, zebras, starlings, and harvester ants. Leonard led a large,multidisciplinary project that culminated in a major field demonstration in Monterey Bay, CA of a first-of- its-kind automated and adaptive ocean observing system, featuring a coordinated network of underwater robotic vehicles. She also works at the intersection of dance and collective dynamics.