PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Gregory Hager

Also known as Greg Hager, Gregory D. Hager

Gregory Hager is a computer scientist whose research links artificial intelligence, computer vision and robotics with medicine. At ten, he began practicing math on a teletype computer; he studied computing at Luther College and Penn, spent a Fulbright year in Germany, then joined Johns Hopkins after Yale. His work includes a tutorial on visual servo control, a surgical data science paper, leadership of Johns Hopkins computer science and its Malone Center, and fellowship honors from Munich and ACM. After leading NSF’s CISE directorate from 2024 to 2025, he remains a Johns Hopkins professor whose 2026 work includes endoscopic reconstruction and scene tracking.

Timeline

  1. 1971

    A teletype at age ten

    At ten, he began practicing basic math on a teletype computer at his school in Postville, Iowa.

  2. 1983–1988

    Degrees in math and computing

    He earned a summa cum laude BA in mathematics and computer science at Luther College in 1983, then an MS in 1986 and PhD in 1988 at the University of Pennsylvania.

  3. 1988–1999

    From Fulbright to Hopkins

    After a Fulbright year at the University of Karlsruhe, he joined Yale’s faculty in 1990 and moved to Johns Hopkins in 1999.

  4. 1996–2015

    Teaching robots to see

    With Seth Hutchinson and Peter Corke, he authored a 1996 tutorial that introduced visual servo control for robotic manipulators through robotics and computer vision. He chaired the Johns Hopkins Department of Computer Science from 2010 to 2015.

  5. 2014

    A Munich fellowship

    He held a Hans Fischer Fellowship at the Technical University of Munich’s Institute for Advanced Study, where he also had a computer science appointment.

  6. 2017

    Connecting robotics and care

    By 2017, he directed the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. ACM named him a 2017 Fellow for contributions to vision-based robotics and computer-enhanced interventional medicine. He coauthored *Surgical Data Science: Enabling Next-Generation Surgery*, a consensus paper that proposed machine-learning analytics to support decisions and improve quality in interventional medicine.

  7. June 2024–May 2025

    Leading NSF’s computing directorate

    In June 2024, he became assistant director of NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and oversaw its activities across those fields. He stepped down in May 2025 after a year leading the directorate.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research at Hopkins continues

    He is a professor at Johns Hopkins whose work spans artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics and computer-integrated surgery. His 2026 papers include *A Training-Free Approach for 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Sinus Endoscopy* and *EndoTracker: Robustly Tracking Any Point in Endoscopic Surgical Scene*.

Sources and credits

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  1. A Pioneer of Artificial Intelligence luther.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Gregory D. Hager - Department of Computer Science cs.jhu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Hager, Gregory - Institute for Advanced Study ias.tum.de. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. A tutorial on visual servo control - Johns Hopkins University pure.johnshopkins.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Gregory Hager Named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery - Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering web.archive.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Surgical Data Science: Enabling Next-Generation Surgery arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Office Hours nsf.gov. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. Greg Hager to Step Down as NSF CISE Assistant Director cra.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Greg Hager - Johns Hopkins University pure.johnshopkins.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.