Professor
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Jing Xiao is the Deans’ Excellence Professor, William B. Smith Distinguished Fellow in Robotics Engineering, Professor and Head of the Robotics Engineering Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). She received her PhD in Computer, Information, and Control Engineering from the University of Michigan. She led the Robotics Engineering Program to become the first full-fledged Robotics Engineering Department in the U.S. in July 2020, offering the most comprehensive degree programs from bachelor’s to PhD’s in robotics engineering. She is the Site Director of NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Robots and Sensors for Human Well-being (ROSE-HUB) at WPI. Before joining WPI in 2018, she was a professor and served as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Computing, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she was also the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Research Award in 2015. She also served as the U.S. National Science Foundation Program Director for the Robotics and Human Augmentation Program. Her research spans robotics, haptics, multi-modal perception, and artificial intelligence, with two highly related themes: one is real-time adaptiveness of robots to uncertainty and uncertain changes in an environment based on perception, and the other is robot manipulation in the presence of unknowns and uncertainties. Jing Xiao is an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. She is an IEEE Fellow. She is a recipient of the 2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation. https://www.wpi.edu/people/faculty/jxiao2