As the newest robotics researcher at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), Professor Nick Rhinehart and his team are developing autonomous systems that can operate safely and effectively in complex, unpredictable environments, such as roads and public spaces.  

Rhinehart joined the university in 2024 from Waymo, one of the leading autonomous ride-hailing services, where he was a member of the research team working on data-driven simulation and optimal driving. 

With the start of a new academic year, we sat down with Rhinehart to learn more about his research, what he’s most excited about and advice for students considering  graduate studies or a career in robotics. 

Please tell us a little bit about yourself.  

I’m from a small town in Pennsylvania. I first became interested in computer science as an undergrad at Swarthmore College, because it felt like the study of problem-solving itself. Over time, that curiosity evolved into a deeper interest in machine learning and robotics: how to build systems that perceive, learn and make decisions in the real world. 

Since then, I’ve worked as a researcher in both academic and industry settings, including as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley’s AI Research Lab and a senior research scientist at Waymo Research. Now I’m delighted to be at the University of Toronto as an assistant professor, where I lead the LEAF Lab (Learning, Embodied Autonomy, and Forecasting Lab). 

Why did you choose U of T? 

U of T is world-class when it comes to robotics and AI, and I was excited by its strong interdisciplinary culture. The chance to collaborate with brilliant researchers across engineering and computer science through the University of Toronto Robotics Institute was a big draw. Toronto itself was another draw because it’s vibrant, multicultural and full of the energy of people pursuing many different lifestyles and careers. Plus, I can easily visit my family back in Pennsylvania, and I genuinely enjoy the weather here (usually). 

What is the main research goal of your lab?  

At the LEAF Lab, we aim to develop broadly useful autonomous systems that efficiently and safely operate in complex environments by advancing the algorithmic foundations of robot learning. Our work combines learning, forecasting and control by teaching systems to anticipate changes in the world, adapt their behaviour and act intelligently. 

One of our specific interests is on learned model-based control methods, which learn to forecast the future from examples and can be used to plan robot behaviour. Some of my prior work on model-based methods is in the context of autonomous driving, where explicitly forecasting what might happen next is crucial to being safe and effective; it’d be very difficult to drive if people on the road weren’t at least somewhat predictable. 

Even if robots were perfect at forecasting and planning, it’s still a challenge to communicate to robots precisely how we want them to behave. This is another of my group’s interests — reward learning — which is about using information from people to model the essence of what we want robots to do. Broadly, we want robots to combine forecasting and reward learning so they can plan ahead, do what people actually want and improve with experience. 

What excites you most about being a faculty member at U of T? 

I’m most excited about building a thoughtful and collaborative lab of excellent researchers who want to solve tough problems and become leaders in robotics and machine learning. Being able to do that at a place like U of T, surrounded by talented students and colleagues, is an amazing opportunity. 

What advice do you have for students who are interested in pursuing a career or graduate studies in robotics? 

Read widely, build things, break them, and figure out why they broke. Get into research early if you can. Familiarize yourself both with recent research trends and foundations from the past. Always be on the lookout for hidden assumptions and insights. Ask a lot of “why?” questions (and try to answer them!) Develop opinions that you can back up with evidence, but keep an open mind. Dream big! 

What is something most people might not know about you? 

One of my favorite Wikipedia articles is “Timeline of the Far Future.” I like tracing the predictions back to their scientific roots, as well as thinking about which are inevitable, which seem unlikely, and which might mainly depend on choices people make.

Professor Greg Evans (ChemE, ISTEP) is one of three co-leads on NEXUS, a research consortium bringing together experts from 17 universities across the UK, Europe, North America and Asia, alongside eight public and industry partners. Evans leads alongside Professor Chris Griffiths from the University of Oxford and Professor Ian Mudway at Imperial College London. 

Funded for five years by the UK Medical Research Council, the partnership will build research capacity and deliver evidence to guide health policy and the development of cleaner vehicle technologies. 

The partnership will also support international collaboration through graduate student and postdoctoral exchanges, as well as public, government and industry engagement. 

“Non-exhaust emissions are an emerging global issue,” says Evans.  

“A typical car emits roughly five kilograms of brake and tire material into the environment each year. While these emissions remain largely unregulated, studies have already detected tire-derived antioxidants and brake metals in fish. What we don’t yet know is how they impact human health.” 

With improvements in combustion technology and the shift to electric vehicles (EVs), tailpipe emissions are declining. At the same time, rising consumer demand for heavier vehicles — such as SUVs, pickup trucks and EVs themselves — has driven up the release of non-exhaust particles, which now often exceed exhaust emissions in cities. 

Evans’ expertise stems from his work on air quality through the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research (SOCAAR) at U of T, which specializes in using advanced instruments and data mining to measure urban air pollution exposure.  

“This research connects with our work on subway air quality, where non-exhaust emissions are the major source,” says Evans.  

“NEXUS will help us understand how these particles affect people and guide the creation of regulations and new technologies with lower emissions.” 

Over the next five years, NEXUS aims to establish research priorities on non-exhaust emissions and elucidate their potential health effects. They also hope to launch pilot projects across disciplines and build a sustainable international network to address this emerging environmental issue. 

The team’s other focus is to influence policy. Europe has introduced the first regulations limiting non-exhaust emissions, and Evans sees opportunities for Canada to follow suit. 

“The potential benefits are significant,” he says.  

“We can help shape regulations in Canada and give Canadian companies a head start in creating vehicle technologies that provide a competitive edge when similar regulations are implemented globally.” 

For Evans, the work is both professional and personal. Having transitioned to electric vehicles years ago, he has noticed an increased need to replace tires compared with past vehicles.  

“This bothers me,” he says.  

“I hope that through NEXUS, and the changes it enables, we’ll be able to mitigate this.” 

Beyond its initial five-year funding, Evans envisions NEXUS laying the groundwork for large, multinational, multidisciplinary research proposals. Communication and results will be shared through webinars, reports, journal publications and a forthcoming LinkedIn page. 

The initiative aims to create opportunities for research exchanges, collaborations across sectors and public engagement activities. 

“The convergence of people from industry, government, NGOs, health, medicine, chemistry and engineering is the best way to implement and lead positive change,” says Evans. 

When Chris Yip became Dean at the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering in 2019, he set out to connect with students, faculty and alumni over coffee. While the coffee dates moved online during the pandemic, Yip kept his commitment to connect and listen. After a highly successful celebration of the faculty’s 150^th anniversary and now into his second term, he has been a key force driving the growth of research, education and community-building at U of T Engineering.

Beyond his role as dean, Yip is an internationally renowned scholar for his work on molecular imaging. A faculty member with the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, he holds cross-appointments with the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research and the Department of Biochemistry in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

In an interview, Yip reflected on the importance of student voices, what it means to think sustainably and what’s next for U of T Engineering.

The Defy Gravity campaign priorities really highlight the importance of engineers in addressing some of society’s biggest challenges, from climate change to chronic disease to ensuring that AI is developed safely and in line with human values. How is the campaign making a difference at the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering?

Defy Gravity succinctly summarizes what we have been doing at U of T Engineering for more than a century and a half and continue to do today: we’re developing bold, innovative solutions to complex challenges, designing a better world for everyone.

In addition to inspiring ambitious thinking, active alumni engagement and generous giving within our community, the campaign prompted us to reimagine the scope of our work and how we communicate our impact. Early in the campaign, and again when we celebrated our 150^thanniversary in 2023, we emphasized four pillars:

• Creating sustainable and thriving global communities;
• Promoting healthy societies;
• Designing intelligent machines for good; and
• Enhancing the development of the 21^st century engineer.

Everything we do falls into one or more of these buckets. These are our grounding principles to lead us through the campaign and through the next 150 years and beyond.

You’ve always championed student voices, the student experience and the importance of developing well-rounded engineers. What does that look like in practice, and how is the faculty helping students grow as leaders, innovators and collaborators?

Students are at the centre of everything we do at U of T Engineering. That’s why my door’s always open — I encourage students to book a coffee chat with me. I want to know what they’re interested in as the faculty thinks through how to best prepare them for meaningful careers in a rapidly changing world.

With our students in mind, we’ve launched a wide range of minors and certificates in AI, business, communications, entrepreneurship, global leadership, nanoengineering and various other emerging areas. And because we recognize that leadership is a major component of engineering practice, U of T Engineering has dedicated resources to leadership training through the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering, which is part of our Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice.

Outside the classroom, our students have rich opportunities to lead, innovate and collaborate on projects they are passionate about, from designing, building and racing EV formula cars to helping launch satellites into space to co-founding startups and so much more.

These experiences shape our students into well-rounded engineering professionals who can look at problems from various perspectives and work effectively with others on promising solutions.

In your career, you have travelled around the world. How have those global experiences shaped your vision for expanding international opportunities for students, and what role have alumni played in supporting this vision?

Travel has opened my eyes to just how big the world can be, and it’s introduced me to new cultures, new ways of thinking and new ideas. But it also drove home the fact that the biggest challenges we face are global — from pandemics to climate change — and that the market for talent and ideas is international as well. I truly believe that global fluency is the most valuable asset we can give our students, especially now, in this economy.

I would like to see as many of our students benefit from an international experience during their time here as we possibly can. I’m always thrilled to hear about students embarking on international exchanges or crossing borders to pursue a Professional Experience Year [PEY] Co-op opportunity or travelling abroad to work on a research project. We’re very fortunate that our alumni understand the importance of international experiences too, and they are always willing to help out any way they can.

We’re also grateful to those who have supported our Centre for Global Engineering, which mobilizes our students and researchers to solve engineering problems in contexts that look very different from downtown Toronto. For example, I’m very excited about a generous gift from alum Lee Lau — a double graduate in electrical and computer engineering — which will create more opportunities for our students in Hong Kong and mainland China.

How is the faculty developing a vision for sustainability in a way that brings together different areas of expertise and prepares students to lead in this space?

Achieving our sustainability goals will require more than a series of quick fixes, such as swapping one material for another. It’s about taking a holistic approach and thinking through how people interact with their environment, infrastructure and technology. It is, by definition, multidisciplinary.

We’re really excited about the new Lawson Climate Institute, which will give our researchers and students more opportunities to collaborate with their peers across U of T on exciting sustainability research.

Hands-on, experiential learning is such a big part of engineering. What steps is the faculty taking to ensure students have access to modern labs and real-world tools that reflect the industries they’ll be entering?

One of our biggest priorities right now is modernizing our labs and learning spaces. To make sure our students are industry-ready, they need to get hands-on experience now using state-of-the-art technologies and equipment.

Just a few months ago, we opened our new Keysight Electronics Laboratory, which was made possible through a generous in-kind donation of advanced equipment from Keysight Technologies. This lab will give students the opportunity to get real experience using modern electrical equipment. We’re looking forward to opening more spaces like these.

The Defy Gravity campaign includes an alumni engagement target – a first for U of T.  What kind of alumni engagement are you seeing in the faculty, and how does it affect current students?

Our alumni engagement is stellar — I always “warn” our students that once you enrol in U of T Engineering, you’ll be a part of this community for life. (I’m a Chem 8T8 grad myself, and I can verify this!)

There is something about this place that keeps me and my fellow alumni coming back. Some of my best memories — staying up late studying with classmates, hanging out at the Pit in the Sandford Fleming basement, my iron ring ceremony — involve U of T Engineering. Coming back is a way to keep those memories and traditions alive.

At U of T Engineering, we’re happy to welcome alumni back as speakers, mentors, PEY employers and volunteers. Our grads show our students all the different places an engineering education can take you — and they are constantly emphasizing to students that they can always rely on this fantastic network that’s 100% behind them.

That kind of support is priceless, and it really aligns with our work on creating a more inclusive community within the faculty. Engineering schools have a history of not being reflective of the societies that we serve: we have to fix this. That means making space for diverse voices at the table so that we can develop solutions that work for everyone. Every deserving student has the right to pursue an engineering education, and the U of T Engineering community is ready to back them up, every step of the way.

You were recently reappointed for your second term as Dean. What’s next for the faculty?

I think a growing concern on everyone’s mind right now is health care: as a large subset of Canadians age and enter their elderly years, we need to make sure our population stays healthy, and engineering can play a major role here.

As Professor Milos Popovic, the director of our Institute of Biomedical Engineering, always says: “there is no health care without engineering.”  That’s why we’ve engaged in so many exciting health care partnerships, including with the University Health Network, which give students experience solving real-world challenges.

Today, our students are creating tiny robotic tools that enable a less-invasive way of performing brain surgery, leveraging AI to improve imaging in breast cancer cases, advancing tissue engineering, and so much more. There are more breakthroughs to come!

I’m also excited about strengthening our partnerships with industry. We just opened our new Partnerships Office at 800 Bay Street, and we have alumni-run businesses operating out of that space. I can’t wait to deepen our work with them and support their growth.

U of T Engineering professor Adrian Nachman (ECE) has been elected a 2025 fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). The RSC’s mission is to advance knowledge, encourage integrated interdisciplinary understanding and address issues that are critical to Canada. Fellowship in the RSC is one of the highest honours a Canadian scholar can achieve.

Nachman is internationally renowned for his breakthroughs in mathematical problems related to medical imaging, some of which had been unsolved for decades. His career is distinguished by a rare combination of fundamental contributions published in top mathematical journals and extensive collaborations with bioengineers to apply his novel ideas to new medical diagnostic technologies.

In medical imaging, the goal is to determine interior structures in the body noninvasively from measurements of acoustic or electromagnetic waves. Waves are modeled as solutions of differential equations that depend on the medium of propagation. This leads to what are known as inverse problems, as their aim is essentially to compute causes from observations of effects. Nachman is known as one of the most original and influential thinkers to have tackled these important mathematical problems.

Nachman has also collaborated with bioengineers and clinical researchers to advance medical imaging technologies. Before joining U of T, he worked with colleagues at the University of Rochester to develop quantitative ultrasound imaging instrumentation for early breast cancer detection. A numerical method developed in this collaboration for simulation of ultrasonic pulses spanning hundreds of wavelengths is now a standard approach in the field. In his research on electric imaging, Nachman invented a method for determining the electric conductivity of tissue from measurements of currents obtained using Magnetic Resonance Imaging by colleagues in biomedical engineering at U of T. The resulting series of joint papers and patent were novel contributions to the area of hybrid inverse problems, which couple two distinct physical responses of tissue to achieve unprecedented high resolution and high contrast images.

As an expert on the mathematics of medical imaging, Nachman was approached by Mitacs to be lead organizer of a Focus Period on the subject. The program he assembled included a major interdisciplinary conference in Toronto and several workshops — on brain imaging, cardiac imaging, numerical procedures, and analytic methods — in Toronto, Vancouver and at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK. In 2013, he gave the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Invited Address at the Joint Mathematics Meetings. In 2014, he was named a Fields Institute Fellow.

“Professor Adrian Nachman’s novel solutions to longstanding inverse problems have enabled key breakthroughs in developing next-generation medical diagnostic imaging methods,” says Christopher Yip, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.  

“On behalf of the faculty, I congratulate him on this prestigious honour.” 

Autonomy algorithms developed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) researchers could one day make cargo transport on the moon safer and more efficient for astronauts.

As part of a team led by MDA Space, Professor Tim Barfoot (UTIAS) and Alec Krawciw (UTIAS PhD student) are developing technology that will help Canada’s proposed Lunar Utility Vehicle (LUV) navigate between cargo drop-off points during future lunar missions — addressing a key transportation challenge once astronauts land on the moon.

“Lunar exploration involves a landing site and a habitat site about five kilometres apart,” says Barfoot, who is also director of the University of Toronto Robotics Institute.

“The landing site is flat for safe shuttle arrival, while the habitat needs to be shielded from radiation, typically behind rocky terrain. This creates a transportation challenge: astronauts must be able to move all cargo from the shuttle to the habitat.”

Unlike previous planetary missions where rovers explore terrain in multiple directions to collect data, the LUV will make regular round trips between fixed locations to deliver goods and equipment to astronauts. This marks the first time a space rover will be required to repeat the same path, making Barfoot’s visual teach-and-repeat (VT&R) navigation framework well-suited for the mission.

“Teach-and-repeat algorithms allow us to pilot the rover along a predetermined path by manually or physically driving it, and once it learns the path, it can automatically repeat the route as many times as you like,” says Barfoot.

“By automating this part of the mission, it saves astronauts time and energy returning to the landing site to pick up cargo, limits astronaut exposure to lunar elements and increases mission productivity.”

As part of his PhD research, Krawciw is adapting the self-driving technology for integration with the Canadian Space Agency’s (CSA) LUV test vehicle, the Lunar Exploration Light Rover (LELR).

In December 2024, Krawciw and Barfoot joined teams from MDA Space and the Centre de Technologies Avancées BRP at the University of Sherbrooke, at the CSA’s analogue terrain in Montreal, Quebec to trial the autonomy on the LELR.

The field test provided an opportunity for the teams to identify and address any hardware and software constraints when the vehicle is operating in lunar-like conditions.

“Adapting our code to the LELR came with some unexpected challenges,” says Krawciw.

“Simulating lunar conditions introduced a five-second delay in command and feedback, so we couldn’t rely on joystick control like we normally would. That pushed us to develop a new semi-autonomous teaching method using short path segments — something we hadn’t done before.” 

“Despite the technical challenges, it’s always exciting to see something I worked on in the lab come to life in a real space-focused mission.”

After a successful field trial, the team was selected by the CSA in July 2025 to conduct an early-phase study for Canada’s proposed LUV as part of the CSA’s Lunar Surface Exploration Initiative. This will be the country’s next contribution to NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon.

As the team prepares the vehicle to be mission-ready, Krawciw is focused on enhancing the system’s readiness in long-duration deployments and improving its performance in real-world conditions.

“We learned a lot from running the system continuously in the field,” says Krawciw.

“It wasn’t just about getting the autonomy to work — it was about making it reliable and user-friendly for operators who might be using it all day, in tough conditions. That perspective is shaping how I approach the next phase of development.”