Biography

 

Prof Edward Johns is Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London, and Associate Professor of Robot Learning in the Department of Computing. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees in engineering from Cambridge University, and his PhD in computer vision from Imperial College. Following a post-doc at UCL, he returned to Imperial as a founding member of the Dyson Robotics Lab to lead the lab's research in robot manipulation. In 2018, he was awarded an RAEng Research Fellowship to study deep learning in robotics and sim-to-real transfer. Later in 2018, he then joined the faculty at Imperial and founded the Robot Learning Lab.

His research lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision, with a particular focus on robot manipulation and efficient imitation learning. Examples of recent impact are Learning a Thousand Tasks in a Day (front cover of Science Robotics in 2025) and Instant Policy (oral at ICLR 2025). In 2022, he received Imperial College's President's Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher, in 2023, he received the UK-RAS Early Career Award, and in 2024, he received the Best Paper Award at ICRA 2024. Externally, he has been on the advisory board of several robotics and AI startups, and in 2022 he was appointed as Head of Robot Learning at Dyson.​​