Nancy Pollard

Also known as Nancy S. Pollard

Nancy Pollard is a roboticist and computer graphics researcher at Carnegie Mellon University whose work on dexterity uses human motion capture to guide robot motion and grasping. After a 1994 PhD at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, she joined Brown University in 1998, won an NSF CAREER award in 2001, and moved to Carnegie Mellon in 2003. Her 2002 SIGGRAPH paper with Jehee Lee, Jinxiang Chai, Paul Reitsma and Jessica Hodgins showed how a motion database can drive avatars in real time. An Amazon Research Award came in 2021, and in 2025 the Altus Dexterity team she belongs to received up to $5 million from the NSF for robotic hand designs. She is a professor in the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department, directs the Dexterous Manipulation and Soft Robotics Lab, and is a founder of FuturHand Robotics.

Now at: Carnegie Mellon University and FuturHand Robotics
Works: 239
Citations: 6,915
h-index: 41
Badges: Founder
Bridge
Loyal

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

1986–1994

Houston and an MIT PhD

She graduates in electrical engineering from the University of Houston in 1986 and earns a PhD in 1994 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where Tomás Lozano-Pérez supervises her dissertation, Parallel Methods for Synthesizing Whole-Hand Grasps from Generalized Prototypes. There she develops grasp and manipulation planning algorithms for the Stanford/JPL and Utah/MIT dexterous hands.
1998–2003

Assistant professor at Brown

After two years in industry and a postdoctoral fellowship in Georgia Tech's College of Computing, where she works at the Animation Lab on physically realistic simulations of human motion, she joins Brown University in 1998. She is an assistant professor in Brown's computer graphics group.
2001

An NSF CAREER award

In 2001, the NSF awards her a CAREER grant at Brown, its most prestigious award for junior faculty. Her project quantifies humanlike enveloping grasps, with the goal of creating credible hand use for digital characters.
2002

Controlling avatars with motion data

At SIGGRAPH 2002, she presents Interactive control of avatars animated with human motion data with Jehee Lee, Jinxiang Chai, Paul Reitsma and Jessica Hodgins. The paper shows how a motion database can be preprocessed for flexible behavior and efficient search, then used for real-time avatar control.
2003

Moving to Carnegie Mellon

She moves to Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. Her research combines robotics and computer graphics, using motion capture to guide robot motion and grasping and using robotics to synthesize the motion of people in computer animation.
2021

Amazon award and crop manipulators

In 2021, she receives an Amazon Research Award for "Contact areas for manipulation capture, retargeting, and hand design". In July 2021, the National Science Foundation announces the USDA-NIFA AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture, where she designs soft manipulators gentle enough for crops, using AI and video capture techniques from her Graphics Lab.
2025

Altus Dexterity and FuturHand

In 2025, Altus Dexterity, a team from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Houston that includes her, receives up to $5 million from the NSF to continue its robotic hand designs. She teams up with Dominik Bauer and Cornelia Bauer to launch FuturHand Robotics, which tests its products in Bosch factories.
As of October 2026

Professor and lab director

She is a professor in the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon, director of the Dexterous Manipulation and Soft Robotics Lab, and a founder of FuturHand Robotics. Her primary research objective is to understand dexterity and to create genuinely dexterous robots.