Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula is an incoming assistant professor of computer science and a member of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute. His research focuses on building full-stack robotic systems that can perceive, reason, and act in the real world. He works mainly at the perception-action interface, tackling both how robots should represent the world around them and how they use it for action.
Jatavallabhula’s work aims to advance the development of general-purpose robots capable of autonomous operation across a wide range of environments and tasks—routinely accomplished by humans—by designing structured world models, sensorimotor control algorithms, and computational learning frameworks. These models and systems are intended to enable robots to achieve, and eventually exceed, human-level intelligence and dexterity, drawing inspiration from several adjacent fields including computer vision, machine learning, and cognitive science. His work has been recognized with graduate fellowships from NVIDIA and Google, a Best Paper Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and induction into the Robotics: Science and Systems Pioneers cohort.
Jatavallabhula received his PhD from the Université de Montréal and spent time as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently a research scientist at Meta AI, working with its robotics research team.