John Galeotti

Timeline

1. 2001–2009

   Computer engineering to a Robotics PhD

   He earns a BS in computer engineering at North Carolina State University in 2001 and an MS in the same field in 2002. At Carnegie Mellon, he earns an MS in Robotics in 2005 and a PhD in Robotics in 2007, then completes postdoctoral work in Robotics in 2009.

2. 2001–2006

   Valedictorian and an NSF fellowship

   He graduates as valedictorian at North Carolina State University in May 2001 and holds its Dean's Fellowship from August 2001 to August 2002. He then holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship from August 2003 to August 2006.

3. 2011

   Best poster at IPCAI

   He receives the Best Poster Award at the International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions (IPCAI) in 2011.

4. 2019

   The TRACIR trauma care project

   In May 2019, the US Department of Defense awards the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon four-year contracts totaling more than $7.2 million to build TRACIR, an autonomous trauma care system that fits in a backpack and uses AI to extend the golden hour for treating combat casualties. He is one of the Carnegie Mellon robotics faculty members on the project.

5. 2021

   Leading Carnegie Mellon's POCUS AI team

   In June 2021, DARPA selects Carnegie Mellon as one of five teams for its Point-of-Care Ultrasound Automated Interpretation (POCUS AI) program, and he heads the CMU team as director of the Biomedical Image Guidance Laboratory. The program asks for AI that identifies injuries from 15 to 30 images or video clips, so his team puts knowledge from clinical experts on top of the AI system.

6. 2022

   The W-Net ultrasound network

   In February 2022, Medical Image Analysis publishes the first findings on his W-Net, a convolutional neural network that takes raw ultrasound waveforms along with the static ultrasound image to segment and label tissues. Initial tests in breast tumor detection show W-Net outperforming established diagnostic AI frameworks.

7. 2024

   Team Chiron at the Triage Challenge

   In August 2024, he is among the Robotics Institute researchers on Team Chiron, the Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh team in DARPA's three-year, $7 million Triage Challenge. His focus is on using sensors and AI to estimate physiological signs of trauma in a noncontact way.

8. As of October 2026

   Senior systems scientist at CMU

   He is a Senior Systems Scientist in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, where he directs the Biomedical Image Guidance Laboratory and builds experimental systems for image-guided interventions, diagnosis and biomedical research. He contributes to the open-source Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) and teaches the graduate course Methods in (Bio)Medical Image Analysis, offered in Spring 2026 as 16-725 at Carnegie Mellon and BioE 2630 at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is an adjunct assistant professor of bioengineering. His active projects include ultrasound segmentation that generalizes across real-world patient diversity, autonomous ultrasound scanning and needle insertion.