Spring 2011 GRASP Seminar – Thomas Henderson, National Science Foundation, “Robotics at NSF: CISE Programs and Initiatives”

Thomas C. Henderson received his BS in Math with Honors from Louisiana State University in 1973 and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979. He is currently a rotator (IPA) at the National Science Foundation (since August 2010), and a full Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. He has been at Utah since 1982, and was a visiting professor at DLR in Germany in 1980, and at INRIA in France in 1981 and 1987, and at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany in 2003. Prof. Henderson was chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Utah from 1991-1997, and was the founding Director of the School of Computing from 2000-2003.

Prof. Henderson is the author of Discrete Relaxation Techniques (University of Oxford Press), and editor of Traditional and Non-Traditional Robotic Sensors (Springer-Verlag); he served for 15 years as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems and was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. His research interests include autonomous agents, robotics and computer vision, and his ultimate goal is to help realize functional androids. He has produced over 250 scholarly publications, and has been principal investigator on many significant research projects. Prof. Henderson is a Fellow of the IEEE, and received the Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology in 2000.