Evan Lerner
Monroe Kennedy III graduated from the doctoral program in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in 2019 and is now an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Focusing on human-robot interaction during his time in the GRASP lab, he is the director of Stanford’s Assistive Robotics and Manipulation Lab, which aims to develop technology that can better anticipate people’s needs and act accordingly.
Kennedy is also the academic co-lead of Black in Robotics, a new organization that advocates for diversity and inclusion in the robotics community. He and fellow academic co-lead Ayanna Howard, chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, recently spoke with The Robot Report podcast about their experiences and their vision for more equitable tech and engineering fields.