Presenter

Nancy Pollard is a Professor in the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1994, where she performed research on grasp planning for dexterous robot hands. She received the NSF CAREER award for research on “Quantifying Humanlike Enveloping Grasps” and the Okawa Research Grant for “Studies of Dexterity for Computer Graphics and Robotics.” She founded the course “Hands: Design and Control for Dexterous Manipulation,” at Carnegie Mellon and has been teaching this course since 2010. Her research goal is to understand human dexterity and create dexterous behavior in robots. She has led the development of several generations of dexterous soft robotic hands and leads the CMU Foam Hands Laboratory.