Association for Computing Machinery has named Chad Jenkins, professor of robotics at the University of Michigan, a 2025 ACM Fellow for contributions to robot learning and broadening participation in robotics and AI.
“This recognition reflects the incredible collaborative environment at Michigan,” said Jenkins. “Our work in enhancing robot capabilities and making robotics more accessible has always been a team effort.”
Jenkins directs the Laboratory for Progress, where his team develops methods for computational reasoning and perception to enable robots to learn from and assist people in everyday environments. His research spans robot learning from demonstration, computer vision, human-robot interaction and autonomous mobile manipulation.
The ACM Fellow designation recognizes the top 1% of the organization’s more than 100,000 members worldwide. Jenkins was one of 71 new Fellows named this year, selected by their peers for outstanding contributions through technical innovation and service to the field.
Jenkins was the founding chair of the Michigan Robotics undergraduate program, leading the creation of the robotics major, which launched in 2022 as the first such program at a top-ten engineering school. He also developed the Distributed Teaching Collaboratives, which co-creates and teaches robotics courses with students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other Minority-Serving Institutions, including Morehouse, Howard and Berea College. The model uses open-source course materials and a flipped-classroom format designed to be accessible to students with no prior programming experience.
Jenkins is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction and currently serves on the ACM Council and as Vice President for Educational Activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the CNA Corporation and is serving as Program Chair for the AAAI 2026 conference. In 2024, he received the ACM/CMD-IT Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing.
