Naomi Leonard

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is the director of the Princeton Council on Science and Technology and an associated faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology.

Leonard graduated from Princeton University with a B.S.E. degree in mechanical engineering in 1985.From 1985 to 1989, she worked in the electric power industry.She graduated from the University of Maryland with a M.S. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1994, in electrical engineering, under the supervision of P. S. Krishnaprasad.She Joined Princeton's faculty as an assistant professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 1994.

Leonard's research is in the area of dynamics and control theory. She focuses on the control of multi-agent systems, with an emphasis on collective sensing, decision-making, and motion. Her work includes the study of multi-agent systems in nature and the application of insights from nature to man-made systems.

Many of Leonard's projects have involved the control of aquatic vehicles. In 2006, she led the Adaptive Sampling and Prediction project, which used 10 underwater vehicles to form an automated and adaptive ocean observing system in Monterey Bay. She operates the underwater robotic tank lab at Princeton.

• 1995 National Science Foundation CAREER Award
• 2004 MacArthur Fellows Program
• 2007 IEEE Fellow
• 2012 Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics