Dr Edward Johns Receives UK-RAS Early Career Award

Early Career Award at EPSRC’s UK-RAS Network Awards

Dr Edward Johns, a Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London's Department of Computing, was recently honoured with the Early Career Award at EPSRC’s UK-RAS Network Awards. The award recognises exceptional individuals in the early stages of their academic career, for their notable contributions to the field of robotics and autonomous systems. Examples of his research that were acknowledged through this award can be seen at www.robot-learning.uk/research.

Dr Johns, who holds a BA and MEng from Cambridge University and a PhD from Imperial College, is the Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London. In 2018, he was awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, after which he was appointed as a Lecturer and founded the Robot Learning Lab. In his research, he studies the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, and he has been pioneering methods for robots to rapidly learn new skills with their arms and hands. His long-term goal is to develop robots which can learn everyday skills in everyday environments by interacting with non-experts, such as by enabling people to teach robots using physical demonstrations of skills, or to communicate with robots using natural language.

The EPSRC’s UK-RAS Network Awards play a crucial role in recognising excellence and achievements in the UK's robotics and autonomous systems community, fostering growth and collaboration among researchers and experts in the field. Dr Johns' recognition demonstrates the importance of nurturing early career researchers and their potential to advance the field of robotics, particularly in human-robot interactions. The Department of Computing is proud of Dr Johns' well-deserved accolade and looks forward to his continued contributions to the field. This award follows Dr Johns being awarded the President’s Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher at Imperial College in 2022.