Torin Clark

Torin K. Clark is an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he is a principle investigator in the Bioastronautics Laboratory and a faculty affiliate of BioServe Space Technologies. His research is focused on the challenges that humans face during space exploration missions, in particular interaction of human-autonomous and human-robotic systems, with an emphasis on human-in-the-loop experiments. He earned his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT in 2013, as was a National Space Biomedical Research Institute postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. His work has been supported by the Army, NASA, Boeing, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. He is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Chris Heckman

Christoffer Heckman is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University, after which he was a postdoc at the Naval Research Laboratory as an NRC Research Associate. He then took a position as a Research Scientist at the Autonomous Robotics and Perception Group (ARPG) under Prof. Gabe Sibley at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he conducted research on fusing perception into the model-predictive control pipeline, extensively reworking modern visual-inertial motion estimation and SLAM approaches to carry probabilistic measures of state through the planning and control processes for autonomous systems and robots. He is now the director of ARPG, where his current research focuses on developing mathematical and systems-level frameworks for autonomous control and perception applying concepts of nonlinear dynamical systems to the design of control systems for autonomous agents, leveraging machine learning and discrete algorithms in robotics and cyber-physical systems.

Steve McGuire

Steve McGuire is a Graduate Research Assistant in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow, his research explores how autonomous systems can improve their fault recovery strategies by learning about the humans that might be available to help. He has worked with robotic systems since his undergraduate internship at NASA Ames’ Intelligent Robotics Group in 2001, earning his BS in Computer Engineering from Penn State in 2003 and subsequently competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004. After a career in the United States Marine Corps as a helicopter pilot, he served as lead avionics engineer for a Google Lunar X Prize competitor before returning to school to pursue his PhD in Aerospace Engineering. He is currently pursuing postdoc opportunities.

Jay McMahon

Jay McMahon is an Assistant Professor in the H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He earned his PhD at CU in 2011, his MS in Astronautical Engineering from USC in 2006, and his BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2004. From 2004 - 2008, he worked for the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA, where he analyzed launch vehicle guidance systems and supported launches of US Government spacecraft on Delta II, Delta IV, and Atlas V vehicles. He is a science team co-investigator for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, where he focuses on estimation of Bennu’s gravity field, the associated internal mass distribution, and the YORP effect as part of the radio science investigation. His research interests include spaceraft guidance, navigation and control, spacecraft autonomy, astrodyanmics, asteroid science, and resource utilization.

Daniel Szafir

Daniel Szafir is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He holds courtesy appointments in the CU Aerospace Engineering Department and the Department of Information Science. Dr. Szafir’s research interests, which span the fields of human-robot interaction (HRI) and human-computer interaction (HCI), involve exploring how emerging interactive technologies, such as small aerial robots, wearable devices, and immersive virtual environments, may be designed to provide new forms of assistance to users in domains including collaborative work, education, and space exploration. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2015 and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30: Science list in 2017. His research support has included NASA, the National Science Foundation, Google, Intel, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.