Michael Montemerlo, PhD

Michael Montemerlo, Hertz Fellow 1997, has a cure for the commuter blues. He made contributions to the field of efficient probabilistic methods for mobile robots. He attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in 1997, and PhD in 2003. His thesis advisors were William L. Whittaker and Sebastian Thrun, both of whom would direct the winning teams in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Under Thrun, Montemerlo became leader of the team at Stanford University that wrote the software for Stanley, an autonomous Volkswagen that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge ahead of four other autonomous cars finishing the course. He is a Senior Software Engineer at Google.