Thomas Howard Promoted to Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Thomas Howard has been promoted to Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, effective July 1, 2026. Prof. Howard came to the University of Rochester in 2015, though his ties here run deeper than that: he earned his bachelor's degrees in electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering at Rochester before completing his PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier in his career, he was a research technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, and a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Today he directs Rochester's Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where his group develops robots that learn to handle complicated tasks on their own, with work spanning robot motion planning, human-robot interaction, and medical robotics. His honors include a NASA Early Career Faculty Award in 2019 and a NSF CAREER Award in 2022. He also advises the University of Rochester's robotics club, which recently competed in its fourth NASA Lunabotics competition this past May.
"Tom is the rare colleague who cares as much about a sophomore lecture as he does about his next research result," said Selçuk Köse, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "His lab has built Rochester a real name in robotics, and at the same time he has put serious, often thankless work into improving what our undergraduates actually learn. That mix is hard to find, and we are glad to see it recognized."
Prof. Howard also holds secondary appointments in computer science and biomedical engineering and is affiliated with the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.