Kevin Lynch Receives Educator Award From SAE International

May 9, 2007

Kevin Lynch, associate professor of mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, has received the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International, the premier society dedicated to advancing mobility engineering worldwide.

Lynch, along with nine others, received the award at the SAE 2007 World Congress in Detroit.

Lynch's research, supported primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is in robotic manipulation, motion planning and control of mechanical systems, human-robot collaboration and self-organizing systems. He co-directs the Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems, where much of the research is in the area of human/machine interaction -- interaction mediated by physical contact and the exchange of forces and motions.

Lynch is a member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. He is a co-author of the book “Principles of Robot Motion” (2005) and editor of the journal Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Robotics. Lynch has received the NSF's CAREER Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Early Academic Career Award and Northwestern's Engineering and Applied Science Teacher of the Year Award.

Lynch received his Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon in 1996. Before joining Northwestern in 1997, he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow working at the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, where he also taught at the University of Tsukuba.