Naomi Leonard. Photo by David Kelly Crow
By Julia Schwarz
July 13, 2023
Naomi Ehrich Leonard, an expert in control and dynamical systems, has been named the chair of Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, effective July 1.
Leonard, the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, joined the Princeton faculty in 1994. She leads the Leonard Lab and has advised over 35 Ph.D. students, 50 undergraduate theses, 20 post docs, and published over 200 peer-reviewed articles. Leonard's research focuses on the dynamics and control of complex systems composed of many interacting agents, such as robots, animals, or humans that move, sense, and decide together.
Leonard has developed and applied theory and methodology to investigate the behavior, learning, and resilience of groups in uncertain and changing environments. With these tools she has studied the mechanisms of collective behavior in fish schools, bird flocks, honeybee swarms, and ant colonies, and she has designed rules for distributed 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.
She succeeds Howard Stone, Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor, who served as MAE department chair for nine years, or three consecutive three-year terms. Stone oversaw a period of steady growth and innovation in the department. Leonard said she plans to build on the work of her predecessor, aiming to further innovate, grow the department, and advance the mission of excellence in research, teaching and education.
Leonard completed her doctoral work at the University of Maryland and received a bachelor of science in engineering degree from Princeton. Her work has been recognized by a MacArthur Fellowship, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and fellowships 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, and is associated faculty with the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics and Biophysics Graduate Program, and affiliated faculty member of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
Alongside Leonard, Michael E. Mueller has been appointed associate chair, a new position in the department. Mueller, an expert in computational modeling of multi-physics turbulent reacting flows, joined the Princeton faculty in 2012. He is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and has served as the director of graduate studies since 2020.