Sertac Karaman

Director, LIDS; Professor, Aeronautics and Astronautics

Sertac Karaman is Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) – interdepartmental research center committed to advancing research and education in the analytical information and decision sciences. He is also the faculty co-director of Mission Innovation Experimental (MIx)  and the faculty director of the Amazon MIT Science Hub.

He has obtained B.S. degrees in mechanical engineering and in computer engineering from the Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 2007; an S.M. degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 2009; and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science also from MIT in 2012. His research interests lie in the broad areas of mobile robotics, autonomous vehicles, and embedded systems, focusing on aerospace applications. His research draws expertise from multiple fields, including probability theory, stochastic processes, stochastic geometry, formal methods, and optimization, machine learning, computer vision, computer graphics, computer architecture and integrated circuits. The application areas of his research include driverless cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, consumer robotics, extended reality and many others.

He serves on the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Foundation Board and acts as the Secretary of the RSS Foundation. He is a co-founder of Optimus Ride, a Boston-based MIT-spinoff startup company that is developing self-driving vehicle technologies to enable accessible, equitable, safe and sustainable mobility for all – which was acquired by Magna in 2021.