Victoria Preston

Victoria Preston is a roboticist and graduate researcher developing embodied intelligence tools that tackle outstanding challenges in expeditionary sciences, such as uncovering complicated dynamical relationships in partially-observable spatiotemporal systems, and embedding scientific intuition in adaptive robotic behaviors. Alongside her advisors Prof. Nicholas Roy and Dr. Anna Michel at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), respectively, Victoria has developed and deployed sampling strategies for flying, sailing, and swimming vehicles to study greenhouse gas transport across the atmosphere-ocean continuum. Before her current post in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, Victoria attained a B.S. in Robotics Engineering from Olin College where she developed the "SnotBot" -- a flying, non-invasive cetacean "blow" collector for marine biologists -- and also studied biomimetic control and autonomy for marine archeological applications at the Centre of Biorobotics at TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia under Prof. Maarja Kruusmaa and supported by a Fulbright Grant. Her graduate research has been supported by a NDSEG fellowship and Martin Fellowship for Sustainability. Victoria's research vision is to collaboratively develop technologies with scientists to study the most extreme, remote, or complicated phenomena on this and other planets by making technical contributions in field robotics, spatiotemporal modeling, and decision-making under uncertainty.