天美传媒

Like many scientists, invested teachers became powerful mentors in Noah鈥檚 life, and helped define his career. As an undergraduate student, he started working in the lab of Dr. Jim Carrington at Oregon State University. 鈥淏efore I started working in the lab, I hadn鈥檛 thought about working with plants. I became really interested in the research they were doing in the Carrington Lab, so I decided to go to graduate school and work in the lab as a PhD student,鈥� explains Noah.

At the same time, Noah began pursuing a career in plant science, a new technology was emerging in the scientific community: high-throughput DNA sequencing. 鈥淲e went from sequencing a few hundred DNA molecules at a time to doing millions at a time.鈥� A year into grad school, the lab was collecting so much data that he began learning how to program and do data analysis with a computer. 鈥淚 shifted pretty hard away from lab work at that point.鈥� He hasn鈥檛 looked back since.

Today, Noah leads the Data Science Facility. His team builds computational tools that help other scientists solve big data problems. These custom tools could be anything from an algorithm, to a program, to the infrastructure that houses a particular suite of software tools. 鈥淎 lot of times in science, you can鈥檛 just ask a question and use a tool that comes out of the box,鈥� says Noah. As a result, he has made it his team鈥檚 mission to be a collaborative hub at the Danforth Center that creates tools that help bridge different areas of expertise.

Christensen is a national policy leader for the field of robotics and has testified before Congress on the subject. He is the head of a nationwide effort to draft a robotics roadmap and explore the field’s potential to transform U.S. society. Most recently, he served as Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech. Christensen's research covers computer vision, artificial intelligence and robotics, and his primary emphasis has been on a systems-oriented approach to machine perception, robotics and design of intelligent machines. He and his team seek solutions that are theoretically sound, with well-defined implementations that can be evaluated in realistic situations. He has worked with a number of industry partners, including Boeing, KUKA, iRobot, BMW and Apple.


 
Before joining UC San Diego as director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at the Jacobs School, he was the founding director of Institute for Robotics and Intelligent machines (IRIM) at Georgia Institute of Technology (2006-2016). He has published more than 350 contributions across AI, robotics and vision. Christensen received the Engelberger Award 2011, the highest honor awarded by the robotics industry. He was also awarded the "Boeing Supplier of the Year 2011" with 3 other colleagues at Georgia Tech. Christensen is a fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He received an honorary doctorate in engineering from Aalborg University 2014.