Daniela Rus

Daniela Rus is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where she leads one of the world’s most influential research ecosystems in robotics and artificial intelligence. Her research spans autonomous systems, mobile computing, data science, soft robotics, and distributed intelligence, with a long-standing goal of creating machines that seamlessly integrate into human environments. Rus is widely recognized for foundational contributions to robot design, adaptive systems, and large-scale coordination, and her work has influenced fields ranging from transportation to manufacturing and healthcare. She is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI, and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before joining MIT, she earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. Rus continues to lead research that bridges computation, physical systems, and societal-scale applications, while mentoring generations of roboticists and computer scientists.