Emanuel Todorov

Emanuel (Emo) Vassilev Todorov (born 1971), a neuroscientist, is an associate professor and director of the Movement Control Laboratory[1] at the University of Washington. He introduced the use of optimal control as a formal explanatory framework for biological movement (see below). He is the principal developer of the MuJoCo physics engine.[2]

Todorov completed his PhD in MIT under the supervision of Michael Jordan and Whitman Richards.[3] He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit[4] at UCL under Peter Dayan and Geoffrey Hinton. He is a recipient of the 2004 Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience.[5]

In 2002 he proposed that stochastic optimal control principles are a good theoretical framework for explaining biological movement.[6] In 2011 this view was acknowledged by one of its critics, Karl Friston, to have become "the dominant paradigm for understanding motor behavior in formal or computational terms."[7] It has been described in the popular scientific press together with other connections between biology and optimisation principles.[8] An editorial comment by Kenji Doya about one of Todorov's articles in PNAS called it "a refreshingly new approach in optimal control based on a novel insight as to the duality of optimal control and statistical inference".[9]

His work on robotic hands has been featured in popular publications on robotics.[10][11][12] In January 2017 he was interviewed for the Robots Podcast.[13]

He is the recipient of 11 National Science Foundation grant awards totalling more than $7.5 million as Principal Investigator.[14]