Rate My Professor Daniela Rus

Daniela Rus is the MIT Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She serves as Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the largest research laboratory at MIT, and as Deputy Dean of Research for the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. Rus earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University and her undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa. Before joining the MIT faculty in 2003, she was a professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College.

Rus's research interests focus on robotics, artificial intelligence, mobile computing, and data science, emphasizing the development of autonomy through the synergy of a robot's physical form and intelligent control systems. Her pioneering contributions include soft robots such as ingestible origami devices for medical applications like MiniSurgeon, aquatic explorers modeled after fish and sea turtles, self-assembling modular boats, and efficient liquid neural networks inspired by biological systems. Key publications encompass "Design, Fabrication, and Control of Soft Robots" in Nature (2015), "On-demand high-capacity ride-sharing via dynamic trip-vehicle assignment" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017), and "Exploration of underwater life with an acoustically controlled soft robotic fish" in Science Robotics (2018). She has garnered major awards including the Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, fellowships from ACM, AAAI, and IEEE, membership in the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 2017 Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Award, the 2018 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, and the 2024 John Scott Award. Through leadership at CSAIL, Rus guides over 1,000 researchers, advancing machine intelligence for real-world challenges and extending human capabilities via collaborative robotics.