Bio


Somil Bansal is an assistant professor at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, he was an assistant professor in the ECE department at the University of Southern California. He received an MS and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from the University of California at Berkeley in 2014 and 2020, respectively. Before that, he obtained a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2012. After his PhD, he spent a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car project). He has also collaborated closely with companies like Skydio, Google, Boeing, as well as NASA AMES/JPL. Somil is broadly interested in developing mathematical tools and algorithms for the control and analysis of safety-critical autonomous and robotic systems, with a special emphasis on ensuring the safety of learning-enabled systems. Somil has received several awards, most notably the NSF CAREER award, the Eli Jury Award at UC Berkeley for his doctoral research, the RSS Pioneer Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.

Academic Appointments


Honors & Awards


  • CAREER Award, NSF (2022)
  • Eli Jury Award, UC Berkeley (2020)
  • RSS Pioneer, RSS (2019)
  • Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley (2019)

Professional Education


  • PhD, UC Berkeley, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (2020)
  • MS, UC Berkeley, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (2014)
  • BTech, IIT Kanpur, Electrical Engineering (2012)

All Publications