Key Facts
Career & Education
About
Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University, where she directs the Princeton Council on Science and Technology and serves as an associated faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. She is the founding editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Leonard's research explores nonlinear control, collective dynamics, and decision-making in multi-agent systems, with applications in robotics, biology, and social networks. She earned a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1987. As a Marshall Scholar, she received a MASt in Applied Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1988 and a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge in 1994. Leonard joined the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor in 1996, advancing through the ranks to full professor. Her contributions have been recognized with election to the National Academy of Engineering (2018), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), and other honors including the MacArthur Fellowship (2019). She grew up in Colorado and resides in Princeton, New Jersey.