Executive Director, Institute for Experiential Robotics

The Institute for Experiential Robotics (IER) at Northeastern University focuses on the development of robots able to learn and adaptively execute autonomous behaviors from human partners and/or other robots. Experiential robotics identifies and studies use-driven research problems at the intersection of collective human-robot experience, including:

• Safe and reliable manipulation of tools and objects

• Machine learning for dexterous manipulation of novel objects

• Bilateral learning in human-robot interaction

• Robust inference of human intent

• Advanced understanding of human movement

• Secure and resilient autonomous systems

• Personalized human-robot collaboration

• Ethics of autonomous robots in support of humans

• Adaptive robot navigation in human environments

• Socioeconomic impact of collaborative robots on human work

Experiential robotics addresses these interdisciplinary research questions to advance the capabilities of autonomous robots to perform everyday tasks in collaboration with humans. Widespread adoption of autonomous robots in a broad range of human environments relies on robust robot performance and robots' ability to adapt to uncertainties inherent in everyday human experience, safety protocols, human comfort, and social factors.

Responsibilities:

The IER is hiring an Executive Director (ED) to manage the operations of the institute. The ED will collaborate with the IER principal investigators to ensure that their projects are supported with proper facilities and staff. The ED will leverage existing COE and University functions including finance, development, and IT to enable timely execution of projects from start to completion. The ED will manage the IER non-research staff and develop a program of experiential learning opportunities for Northeastern University students within the IER.

The IER Executive Director must be able to work with the IER Leadership Team to set mission, vision, and strategy to support the business goals of the institute. The ED must be able to identify partnership opportunities in industry that will complement the work of the institute with a focus on long term strategic growth. The ED will have in-depth knowledge of all the planned and in progress IER research to effectively represent and communicate the work of the IER to university administration, external funding organizations, and industry partners with the goal of expanding existing relationships and establishing new partnerships.

The IER Executive Director will establish a global leadership presence for University within the robotics research and innovation ecosystem.

Qualifications:

The Executive Director of the IER should have 10+ years of leadership and management experience in both corporate and academic settings. Direct experience in robotics engineering is required for this position. The ED must have demonstrated experience with establishing and managing budgets, hiring, developing, and leading staff, proposal writing, corporate contracts, intellectual property confidentiality, and public speaking in both an academic and corporate settings. Experience innovating in a nimble startup environment is highly desirable. Masters Degree in an engineering discipline.