Ludovic Righetti Named Glenn Y. Louie Professor at NYU Tandon
The endowed professorship honors a Silicon Valley semiconductor pioneer whose career spanned the Apollo program and the early era of Intel microprocessors
Ludovic Righetti, a leading figure in robotics and autonomous systems research, has been named the Glenn Y. Louie Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, an endowed professorship that recognizes both exceptional scholarly achievement and the lasting impact of a distinguished alumnus.
A Researcher at the Forefront
Righetti holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE). He is the founding co-director of NYU’s Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence, which launched in December 2025 and has helped establish Brooklyn as a major hub for robotics research on the East Coast. He is the associate department chair of MAE and director of its graduate program. He also holds an international chair at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute in France.
A graduate of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he earned both his engineering diploma in computer science and his doctorate, Righetti led the Movement Generation and Control Group at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, before joining NYU Tandon in 2017. His research, carried out through the Machines in Motion Laboratory in Brooklyn, focuses on the planning, learning, and control of movement for autonomous robots — with a particular emphasis on legged locomotion and manipulation. He is also interested in the broader societal impacts of robotics and AI and regularly works with international organizations on the topic, especially on issues related to peace and security.
The laboratory’s work addresses one of robotics’ central challenges: enabling machines to walk and manipulate objects safely and reliably in complex, unpredictable environments. Its open-source contributions, including widely used hardware, solvers for trajectory optimization, model predictive control and reinforcement learning, have made it a valued resource for the broader research community. Righetti regularly receives awards for his research and educational contributions including several best paper awards and the 2024 NYU Jacobs Excellence in Education Innovation Award.
An Alumnus Who Helped Shape an Industry
The professorship was established thanks to the generosity of Glenn Y. Louie, whose career traced the arc of the modern technology industry. Louie worked on the Apollo Spacecraft computer development program, contributed to semiconductor processing, led the design of an early-generation Intel microprocessor, and helped pioneer the field of electronic computer-aided design — foundational work whose influence is still felt in every chip manufactured today.
Louie credits the graduate education he received at what is now NYU Tandon with providing him with both the technical grounding and the intellectual confidence to cross multiple emerging technology frontiers. That experience has shaped his view of what university research can accomplish and his decision to invest in it.
He has expressed particular interest in engineering solutions that will contribute to sustainability efforts and reduce income inequality, goals that closely align with the direction Righetti has set for his own work. Alongside its technical ambitions, the Machines in Motion Laboratory is guided by a commitment to pursuing applications of robotic technology that improve the quality of life, expand human capability, and support more equitable societies.
The Glenn Y. Louie Professorship reflects both the rigor of Righetti’s scholarship and the forward-looking generosity of an alumnus who has seen, firsthand, how university research seeds the technologies that shape the world.
