Short Bio

Angela Schoellig is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), where she heads the Dynamic Systems Lab. She is also an Associate Director of the Center for Aerial Robotics Research and Education (CARRE) at the University of Toronto. With her team, she conducts research at the interface of robotics, controls and machine learning. Her goal is to enhance the performance, safety and autonomy of robots by enabling them to learn from past experiments and from each other. Angela has been working with aerial vehicles for the past nine years and, more recently, has applied her motion planning, control and learning algorithms to self-driving vehicles. You can watch her robots perform slalom races and flight dances at www.youtube.com/user/angelaschoe.

She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship (as one of two in the area of robotics; US/Canada-wide award), a Ministry of Research, Innovation & Science Early Researcher Award, a Connaught New Researcher Award, and the Best Robotics Paper Award at CRV 2014. She is one of Robohub’s “25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)”, winner of MIT’s Enabling Society Tech Competition, finalist of Dubai’s 2015 $1M “Drones for Good” competition, and youngest member of the 2014 Science Leadership Program, which promotes outstanding scientists in Canada. She has been a keynote speaker at various outreach events including TEDxUofT, Lift China, and the Girls Leadership in Engineering Experience weekend.

Angela received her Ph.D. from ETH Zurich (with Prof. Raffaello D’Andrea), and holds both an M.Sc. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from the Georgia Institute of Technology (with Prof. Magnus Egerstedt) and a Masters degree in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany (with Prof. Frank Allgöwer). Her Ph.D. was awarded the ETH Medal and the 2013 Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award (as one of 35 worldwide).

Robotics Control Theory Machine Learning Dynamic Systems Quadrotors Self-Driving Vehicles

 
Download my  full CV and  head-shot image.

 

Publications

My list of publications is available here and on  Google Scholar.

 

Selected Awards and Honors

• MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 (Technology Review article, University of Toronto news, CBC interview), 2017.
• Sloan Research Fellowship, 2017
• Ministry of Research, Innovation & Science Early Researcher Award, 2017.
• Nominated for a Canada Research Chair Tier 2, 2017.
• Connaught New Researcher Award, 2015.
• MIT Enabling Society Tech Competition First Prize, 2015.
• $1M Drones For Good Competition Finalist, 2015.
  
• IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Video Clip Contest Finalist (with this video), 2014.
• Best Robotics Paper Award at the Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) (with this paper), 2014.
• Science Leadership Program Fellow, 2014.
• Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Prize (as one of 35 worldwide, for my PhD thesis), 2013.
• ETH Medal (awarded to the top 8% of Ph.D. dissertations at ETH Zurich, for my PhD thesis), 2013.
• Named one of “25 women in robotics you need to know about” by Robohub.org, 2013.
• Professor-Peter-Sagirow Award (for outstanding performance in the undergraduate program Engineering Cybernetics, awarded to the top two students out of 70), 2005.

Ongoing Activities

• Affiliations:
  • Associate Director of the Centre for Aerial Robotics Research and Education (CARRE), since 2015.
  • Principal Faculty Advisor for the University of Toronto’s SAE/GM AutoDrive Challenge team competing in a 3-year self-driving competition, 2017-2020.
  • Faculty Advisor of the University of Toronto Aerospace Team (UTAT), since 2015.
  • Affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics and the Lassonde Institute for Mining, since 2014.
• Organizer of the following events:
  • Invited Session on Learning-based Control at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
  • Aerial Robotics Seminar Series at the University of Toronto (see Events here), since 2016.
  • Aerial Robotics International Research Symposium, Jun 21-22, 2017.
• Editor positions:
  • Associate Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), since 2017.
  • Chair of Jury of the IEEE Control Systems Society Video Clip Contest, 2017.
  • Area Chair for the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), 2017.