Short Version

 

Dr Edward Johns is the Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London, where he is also a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor). He received a BA and MEng from Cambridge University, and a PhD from Imperial College. He was then a post-doc at UCL, before returning to Imperial College as a founding member of the Dyson Robotics Lab. In 2017, he was awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, and then in 2018 he was appointed as a Lecturer and founded the Robot Learning Lab. In this lab, Dr Johns and his team are currently developing methods for robots to learn new skills for physically interacting with objects, with a particular emphasis on learning everyday tasks in everyday environments.

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Long Version

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Dr Edward Johns is the Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London, where he is also a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor). He received a BA and MEng in Electrical and Information Engineering from Cambridge University, and a PhD in visual place recognition from Imperial College. Following his PhD, he was a post-doc at UCL working with Prof Gabriel Brostow, before returning to Imperial College as a founding member of the Dyson Robotics Lab with Prof Andrew Davison, where he led the robot manipulation research.

In 2017, he was awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship to continue his research into robot learning, with a particular emphasis on sim-to-real transfer and imitation learning. Then in 2018, he was appointed as a Lecturer and founded the Robot Learning Lab. In this lab, Dr Johns and his team are currently developing methods for robots to learn new skills for physically interacting with objects, with a particular emphasis on learning everyday tasks in everyday environments.

 

He has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers, which have over 3000 citations. Externally, he is on the advisory board for a number of robotics start-ups, such as Karakuri and Muddy Machines, and he recently spent a year as Head of Robot Learning at Dyson in a part-time role. He has received a number of personal awards for his research, including Imperial College's President's Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher in 2022, and the UK-RAS Early Career Award in 2023.

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