You are here: Home → SEAS Directory → Radhika Nagpal
Document Actions

Radhika Nagpal

Faculty
  • Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer
  • Core Member, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
Radhika Nagpal

Contact Information

Office: Maxwell Dworkin 235
Email: rad [ AT ] seas [ DOT ] harvard [ DOT ] edu
Office Phone: (617) 496-6434
Lab Name: Self-Organizing Systems Research Group
Assistant: Joanne Bourgeois
Office: Maxwell Dworkin Building 143
Email: jbourge [ AT ] seas [ DOT ] harvard [ DOT ] edu
Office Phone: 617/495-2719

Recruitment Status

Currently accepting graduate students.

Websites

Education

  1. S.B., 1994, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  2. S.M., 1994, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  3. Ph.D., 2001, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Interests

    • Applied Mathematics & Computational Science
    • Modeling Physical/Biological Phenonema and Systems
    • Computer Science
    • Multi-Agent Systems
    • Marriage of Biological & Artificial Systems
    • Bio-Inspired Robotics and Computing

Primary Teaching Area

Computer Science

Profile

Biological systems, from multicellular organisms to social insects ("superorganisms"), get tremendous mileage from the cooperation of vast numbers of cheap, unreliable, and limited individuals. Engineers are increasingly facing a similar challenge: how to effectively engineer systems that are composed of many agents: distributed networks, programmable materials, groups of robots. Nature can provide insights into principles that allow robust collective behavior to emerge; the challenge is formalizing and generalizing these principles to program new kinds of systems. 

Nagpal's group is interested in engineering and understanding self-organizing multi-agent systems, where large numbers of simple agents cooperate to produce complex and robust global behavior. This work lies at the intersection of computer science (AI/robotics) and biology. Her group studies bio-inspired algorithms, programming paradigms, and hardware designs for swarm/modular robotic systems and smart materials, drawing inspiration mainly from social insects and multicellular biology. The group also investigates models of self-organization in biology, specifically how cells cooperate during the development of multicellular organisms. 

The overall goal is to provide a framework for the design and analysis of self-organizing systems by combining traditional computer science techniques (for managing complexity) with biological models (for robustness at the local level). 

Positions & Employment

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

  • September 2009-Present: Associate Professor of Computer Science

Wyss Institute for Biologically-inspired Engineering

  • 2008-Present: Core Faculty Member

Harvard Medical School

  • 2004-Present: Affiliated Faculty Member, Department of Systems Biology
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
  • 2004-2009: Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Harvard Medical School
  • 2003-2004: Research Fellow
MIT
  • 2001-2003: Postdoctoral Lecturer, Department of Systems Biology
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
  • 1994-1995: Member of Technical Staff

Honors

Selected Publications

  • Programmable Self-Assembly Using Biologically-Inspired Multiagent Control, AAMAS 2002. (pdf)
  • Collective Construction by Mobile Robots with Enhanced Building Blocks, ICRA 2006. (pdf)
  • The Emergence of Geometric Order in Proliferating Metazoan Epithelia, Nature, Aug 31, 2006. (pdf)
  • Self-organizing Desynchronization and TDMA on Wireless Sensor Networks, IPSN 2007. (pdf)
  • Self-organizing Environmentally-adaptive Shapes on a Modular Robot, IROS 2007. (pdf)
  • Automated Global-to-Local Programming in 1-D Spatial Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2008. (pdf)