IEEE Awards Booklet - 2018 - 2

Presentation of awards
sPeaKers
at ieee honors ceremony

Glenn Zorpette is executive editor of
IEEE Spectrum magazine. His interests include chipmaking, vehicles, nuclear and
national-security technologies, audio electronics, DIY, war-zone reconstruction,
technology applications in the developing
world, and digital imaging. His reporting
for IEEE Spectrum has taken him to Iraq,
Afghanistan, Kuwait, the South Pole, Kwajalein Atoll, South Africa, and an underwater habitat in the Caribbean. He has won a National Magazine Award for reporting, has
been a finalist in the same category, and has won a Grand Neal
Award, among other honors. An IEEE Fellow, he holds a B.S. in
electrical engineering from Brown University.

Bruce R. Conklin is an investigator at the
Gladstone Institutes and a professor of medicine, ophthalmology, and pharmacology at
the University of California, San Francisco.
He is also the deputy director of the Innovative Genomics Institute, focusing on
biomedical applications of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats
(CRISPR) technology. His research focuses
on using genome engineering to identify therapeutic approaches
to human disease. Using CRISPR gene editing, his lab is perfecting allele-specific editing of dominant negative genes causing
incurable disease of the retina, motor neurons, and the heart. He
is the founder of several public stem cell and genomics projects
and the Gladstone Stem Cell Core and the Gladstone Genomics
Core laboratories. He pioneered the field of using designer G
protein coupled receptors (RASSLs) for tissue engineering. He is
a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and
is a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.

John Tisdale joined the Molecular and
Clinical Hematology Branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute
(NHLBI) in 1998 and is now chief of the
Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics Section. His group focuses on developing curative strategies for sickle cell disease through
transplantation of allogeneic or genetically
modified autologous bone marrow stem
cells. He graduated from the College of Charleston in South
Carolina with a B.A. in chemistry in 1986. He then earned his
M.D. from the Medical University of South Carolina in 1990. He
completed an internal medicine and chief residency at Vanderbilt
University Medical Center in Nashville and then trained in hematology in the Hematology Branch of the NHLBI, where he
served as a postdoctoral fellow.

Oussama Khatib is a professor with the Department of Computer Science at Stanford
University. His seminal work on robot planning and control has radically changed the basis of manipulation, interaction, locomotion,
and other aspects of system design critical to
the development of human-friendly robots.
He developed the artificial potential field
concept for reactive control of robots, which
became a fundamental framework for real-time obstacle avoidance.
His pioneering contribution of control in operational space rather
than joint space has been integral to advances in whole-body motion and force control, and in humanoid robotics. His recent work
on a robotics-based approach to human motor control and human
motion understanding is providing substantial benefits to restoring
movement and improving human performance. His work on learning human skills and mapping to robot-compliant strategies is becoming fundamental to increasing the autonomous capabilities of
robots in performing complex tasks and cooperating with people.

Cynthia Breazeal is an associate professor of
media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where she founded
and directs the Personal Robots Group at the
Media Lab. She is also founder and chief scientist of Jibo, Inc. She is an award-winning
innovator, designer, and entrepreneur. Her
research focuses on developing principles,
techniques, and technologies for personal robots that are socially intelligent, can interact and communicate with
people in human-centric terms, and can work with humans as peers.
She has developed some of the world's most famous robot creatures
ranging from small hexapod robots, to embedding robotic technologies into familiar everyday artifacts, to creating highly expressive humanoid robots and robot characters. She has recently been working
on investigating the impact of social robots on helping people of all
ages to achieve personal goals that contribute to quality of life in domains such as education, health, wellbeing, and emotive connection
and engagement despite distance.

Grant Imahara is recognized as the electronics and robots expert from Discovery
Channel's Mythbusters. Using a blend of science and fun, he and his colleagues put urban
legends to the test, sometimes with explosive results. He brings his unique skills to the
White Rabbit Project on Netflix. He has hosted
Punkin Chunkin and Killer Robots for Science
Channel, and he has appeared on Junkyard
Wars and Comedy Central's BattleBots. Before his career in front
of the camera, Grant spent nine years working behind the scenes
in special eﬀects as an animatronics engineer and modelmaker for
George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, working on numerous
blockbusters. An IEEE Senior Member, he has a B.S. in electrical
engineering from the University of Southern California. He has
numerous oﬃcial commendations from various organizations, including the City of Los Angeles, the City of San Francisco, and the
White House. Currently he consults for Walt Disney Imagineering
on next-generation robots for Disney's theme parks.

2 | 2018 IEEE awards bookLET

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2018