Dr. Aaron Becker
Aaron Becker loves his wife Laney, his four boys, and swarms of robots. He wasn’t born in Texas, but he got here as soon as he could! Two of his boys were born in Houston.
As an Assistant Prof. in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, he is building a robotics lab. An NSF '16 CAREER recipient & winner of several best papers, his lab manipulates micro-scale swarms with magnetic fields, navigates robotic tools using medical MRIs, kills mosquitos with drones, searches for oil, and assembles structures with swarms. For videos of his lab, visit Dr. Becker's YouTube page. You can help their research by playing their online game which seeks to understand the best ways to control a swarm of robots by a human. The Becker family traveled the United States before settling on Houston. Previously as a Research Fellow with Boston Children's Hospital & Harvard Medical School, he implemented robotics powered and controlled by the magnetic field of an MRI. As a Rice University Postdoc in the Multi-Robot Systems Lab, Aaron investigated control of distributed systems and nanorobotics with experts in the fields. Aaron earned his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aaron and Laney met their freshman year at Iowa State University, became best friends emailing each other while on separate study abroad, started dating junior year, married during grad school, and their oldest two boys were born near the end of Aaron’s Ph.D.