People

Somil Bansal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, where he leads the Safe and Intelligent Autonomy (SIA) Lab. Somil is broadly interested in developing theory, algorithms, and computational tools to ensure safety of AI-enabled autonomous and robotic systems. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020. Before that, he obtained a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2012 and 2014, respectively. After his PhD, he spent a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo, focusing on safe planning for autonomous vehicles. He has also collaborated closely with companies like Skydio, Google, Toyota, NVIDIA, Boeing, as well as NASA JPL on deploying his safety algorithms on real-world autonomous systems. Somil has received several awards, most notably the IEEE Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, the NSF CAREER award, the AIAA Excellence in Teaching Award at Stanford, the Eli Jury Award at UC Berkeley for his doctoral research, and research awards from Toyota and Open Philanthropy.