RADHIKA NAGPAL
(Radhika Nagpal)
I am a Professor in Computer Science, at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I am also a Core Faculty Member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where I co-lead the BioRobotics Platform. Before becoming faculty, I spent a year as a Research Fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. I received my PhD and was a Postdoc Lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), as a member of the Amorphous Computing Group supported by the Bell Labs GRPW Fellowship. I am grateful to have received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010), and the Radcliffe Fellowship (2012). I was named as one of the Nature 10: Top ten scientists and engineers of 2014, by the journal Nature (Dec 2014). Most recently, I co-founded an educational robotics company, ROOT Robotics, for which I serve as the Scientific Advisor. I am also the author of a Scientific American blog article on tenure-track life (7 year postdoc), the advisor for the Harvard Women-in-CS group (WICS), and a strong advocate for a nurturing and inclusive culture in science and for gender parity in academia. I am honored to have received the McDonald Mentoring Award, and to have a large network of mentees and peers who care about these same issues. Personal Bio: Outside of research, I enjoy the arts (painting, music and dance) and our Indian(me)+Caribbean(Q) cultures with my husband Quinton Zondervan and two teenagers. Civic engagement and social justice is very important to my family. This year my husband is running for Cambridge City Council election, and my daughter is on the student government at the CRLS public high-school. I work on many gender equity and diversity efforts within Harvard and Robotics/CS/Academia.
