UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation:
Vijay Kumar

Dr. Vijay Kumar has been named the UPS Foundation Professor in Transportation. Dr. Kumar received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University in 1985 and 1987 respectively.

In 1987 he joined the Penn faculty in the department of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics. He has a secondary appointment in the department of computer and information science and served as Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science for five years.

Dr. Kumar’s research interests lie in the area of robotics and networked multi-agent systems. He directs the GRASP Laboratory, a multidisciplinary robotics and perception laboratory.

He is also a co-founder of Bio Software Systems, a start-up company commercializing novel software tools for the analysis of regulatory networks.

Dr. Kumar is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a Senior Member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and a member of Robotics International and of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He has served on the editorial boards of the following publications: IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the Journal of The Franklin Institute and the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. 

He has been the recipient of several awards including the 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1996 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics, and the Kawamori Best Paper Award at the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

This Chair in Transportation, one of three UPS Foundation Chairs at Penn, is focused on transportation management as enabled by technology.