Scientific American Guest Blog 
The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life.

Nature 10, Dec 2014

Panama, March 2016

TED, April 2017

Radhika Nagpal
Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences 
Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
Harvard University

New! August 2017 (press release)
We have a Startup, ROOT Robotics!

Research Interests: My group is interested in understanding and engineering self-organizing collective systems; we investigate many topics on the border of CS and biology. Two main areas are: (1) Biologically-inspired multi-agent systems: collective decentralized algorithms and swarm robotics (2) Biological multi-agent systems: models of multicellular morphogenesis and collective insect behavior. For more about our lab: SSR website.

Teaching: 
Spring 2018, CS189 (Autonomous Robot Systems)
Fall 2017, CS289 (Bio-inspired Multi-agent Systems)
​Office Hours: By appointment (no more walk in office hours until fall)

Contact: 33 Oxford Street, room 235 (Maxwell-Dworkin Bldg), Cambridge MA 02138.
rad at eecs harvard edu  (note: I do not check email over the weekend) 

Professional Bio:
​I am a Professor in Computer Science, at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I am also a Core Faculty Member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where I co-lead the BioRobotics Platform. Before becoming faculty, I spent a year as a Research Fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. I received my PhD and was a Postdoc Lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), as a member of the Amorphous Computing Group supported by the Bell Labs GRPW Fellowship. I am grateful to have received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010), and the Radcliffe Fellowship (2012). I was named as one of the Nature 10: Top ten scientists and engineers of 2014, by the journal Nature (Dec 2014). In Aug 2017, I co-founded an educational robotics company, ROOT Robotics, for which I serve as the Scientific Advisor. I recently gave a TED talk at the annual TED conference (April 2017) about my research.

​I am also the author of a Scientific American blog article on tenure-track life (7 year postdoc), the founding advisor for the Harvard Women-in-CS group (WICS), and a strong advocate for a nurturing and inclusive culture in science and for gender parity in academia. I am honored to have received the McDonald Mentoring Award, and to have a large network of mentees and peers who care about these same issues.

Personal Bio: Outside of research, I enjoy the arts (painting, music and dance) and our Indian(me)+AfroCaribbean(Q) culture with my husband and two teenagers. Civic engagement and social justice is very important to my family. This year my husband Quinton Zondervan was elected to the Cambridge City Council and my daughter Jahnavi Zondervan is on the student government at the CRLS public high-school and part of the Black Students Union. I work on many gender equity and diversity efforts within Harvard and Robotics/CS/Academia. 

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Recent Press:

• TED Talk (TED Annual Conference, Vancouver, April 2017)
• MIT Technology Review, Profile (Aug 2016)
• The Root whiteboard robot to teach coding (The Atlantic, Nov 2016)
• Nature 10: Ten people who mattered in science this year (Nature, Dec 2014)
• The Gathering Robot Swarm (Kilobots, Science, Aug 2014) 
• Robots to the Rescue, Gazette (Termes Robots, Science, Feb 2014).
• Exploring Collective Intelligence, Video by the Radcliffe Institute, Oct 2013

Co-founders of Root Robotics, Aug 2017