ZeroG Flier! May 2021
TED, April 2017
Scientific American Blog, 2013
The Swarm Garden, 2024
Sea Trek, Mar 2024
Panama, March 2016
With Senator Warren & ROOT, 2020
With Congresswoman Pressley
Family, 2023
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Radhika Nagpal
Roboticist, Professor, Feminist pronouns: she/they I am interested in the study of Self-Organization and Collective Intelligence, how it occurs in nature and how nature-inspired principles can be used in designing robotic systems. I am also interested in how to practically apply these principles to culture in science and engineering. Together with my lab (my "collective"), we study topics at the intersection of robotics, biology, and theory. Two main areas of scientific research are: (1) Bio-inspired Robots & Swarms: we build novel bio-inspired robots and design decentralized collective algorithms and theory (2) Biological Collectives: we use mathematical models and field/lab experiments to study self-organization in cells, insects, and fish. In addition, as a lab we do many experiments on our internal collective culture and engage in social justice activism. To learn more about my work, see the Research, Robots, and Activism pages on this website. Lab Website: Self-Organizing Swarms and Robotics (SSR) Lab Contact: Email: [email protected] (please read the auto-reply) Videos/Talks:
Selected Profiles: Princeton Profile and Augustine Professorship (July 2022) MIT Technology Review, RoboSwarm (Aug 2016) Nature 10: Ten people who mattered in science (Nature, Dec 2014) Selected Press:
Professional Bio (CV): I am currently the Norman R. Augustine '57 *59 Professor of Engineering at Princeton University, joint between the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science (2022-present). Prior to joining Princeton I 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, I spent a year as a Research Fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. I received my PhD (2001) and was a Postdoc Lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) supported by the Bell Labs GRPW Fellowship (1995-2001). I lead the Self-organizing Swarms and Robotics Lab (SSR). Our work includes the design of novel robotics systems inspired by nature, e.g. the Termes robots for collective construction (Science 2014), the Kilobot thousand-robot swarm (Science 2014), the Blueswarm underwater robots (Science Robotics 2021), and the Swarm Garden (Science Robotics 2026), as well as models of biological collective intelligence, e.g. epithelial cell networks (Nature 2006), army ant self-assembly (Nature Comms 2022), and fish schooling (Scientific Reports 2005). I am grateful to have received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010), Radcliffe Fellowship (2012), and be an invited TED Speaker (2017), an AAAI Fellow (2020) and an ACM Fellow (2020). In 2014, I was chosen for the Nature's 10 Award, given to the top ten influential scientists and engineers by the journal Nature. In 2017, I was an invited TED Speaker at the annual TED conference in Vancouver. In 2021, I was featured in Newsweek as one of America's 50 Greatest Disruptors. I co-founded ROOT Robotics in 2017, an educational robotics company aimed at broadening participation in coding, AI, and robotics through creative early education; Root was acquired by iRobot (2019). My lab also developed the Kilobot swarm robots, which were commercialized by K-Team Inc. Over 10K root/kilobot robots have been sold worldwide. In 2020-21 I was an Amazon Scholar working on algorithms for multi-robot systems. Together with my lab, I have conducted field studies with biologists on social insects in Namibia (2012) and Panama (2016) and tested robots on ZeroG parabolic flights for space applications (2021) and in Puerto Rico for future coral reef monitoring experiments (2025). I am 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) and WEcode (2014-2020), and faculty advisor for the Princeton NSBE Chapter (2022-24). I helped start several initiatives, including the Black-in-Robotics Boston Chapter (BiR) and Amazon Day1 Fellowship (fully-funded master program). I am honored to have received the McDonald Mentoring Award (2016), and to have a large network of mentees, peers, and mentors who care about these same issues. I work on many social justice issues within academia; you can read more about this on my Activism page. Personal Bio: Outside of research, I enjoy the arts (painting, dance, music) and our Indian(me)+AfroCaribbean(in-laws) culture with my spouse and two adult kids. Civic engagement and social justice is very important to my family. My spouse Quinton Zondervan works on climate and racial justice, and was an elected Cambridge City Councillor (2017-2024) (TEDx "Go Solar and Save" talk). 
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