Photo by David Kelly Crow
Naomi E. Leonard, the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has won the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award for her distinguished career contributions to the field of automatic control.
Leonard’s research investigates the dynamics and control of complex systems composed of interacting agents such as robots, animals or humans that move, sense and make decisions together. She has developed and applied new tools to explore the mechanisms and collective behaviors in fish schools, bird flocks, honeybee swarms and ant colonies, and has designed rules for robotic vehicles to perform coordinated tasks ranging from environmental monitoring to trash collection in human-populated spaces. Her collaborations span a broad range of disciplines, including ecology and evolutionary biology, neuroscience, oceanography, and the arts.
The award, named after the mathematician Richard E. Bellman, who invented dynamic programming in 1953, has been given annually by the American Automatic Control Council since 1979. The award is considered the highest recognition of professional achievement for U.S. control systems engineers and scientists.
Leonard, who is chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, joined the Princeton faculty in 1994. She completed her doctorate at the University of Maryland and received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton. Her work has been recognized by a MacArthur Fellowship, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellowship with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, International Federation of Automatic Control, and Society for Applied and Computational Mathematics. She was the director of Princeton’s Council on Science and Technology from 2013 to 2023. Leonard is an associated faculty member with the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics and the Biophysics Graduate Program and an affiliated faculty member with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.