Professor Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Ph.D.

Dr. Odest Chadwicke Jenkins is a professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan. From 2004 to 2015, he served on the computer science faculty of Brown University. His research addresses problems in interactive robotics and human-robot interaction, primarily focused on mobile manipulation, robot perception and robot learning from demonstration. His research often intersects topics in computer vision, machine learning and computer animation. He has been recognized as a Sloan Research Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and Young Investigator awards from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Jenkins is currently editor-in-chief of the journal ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is an alumnus of the Defense Science Study Group, where he was a member from 2018 to 2019.

Dr. Jenkins earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics at Alma College in 1996, his Master of Science in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in 1998 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California in 2003.