Gregory S. Chirikjian

Gregory Scott Chirikjian (born 1966) is an American roboticist and applied mathematician, primarily working in the field of kinematics, motion planning, computer vision, group theory applications in engineering, and the mechanics of macromolecules. He currently serves as the head and professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He is known for his theoretical contributions to the kinematics of hyper-redundant (snake-like and continuum) robots and stochastic methods on Lie groups.

Academic life
Chirikjian received a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Baltimore, MD, USA, in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1992. In the same year, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor and full professor in 1997 and 2001, respectively. From 2004 to 2007, he was the Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University. From 2014 to 2015, he served as a program director for the US National Robotics Initiative, which included responsibilities in the Robust Intelligence cluster in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of CISE at the National Science Foundation (NSF). From 2019 to 2023, he was the Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore. He is currently the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Delaware.

Awards and honors
Chirikjian was named NSF's Young Investigator in 1993, Presidential Faculty Fellow in 1994, and was a recipient of the ASME Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal in 1996. He was elected as a fellow of ASME in 2008, and a fellow of IEEE in 2010 for his contributions to hyper-redundant manipulators. In 2019, he received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Machine Design Award.