Pinhas Ben-Tzvi

Dr. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi is a Program Director in the Office of Integrative Activities' Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Section on an IPA assignment from Virginia Tech where he is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the founding Director of the Robotics and Mechatronics Lab. He received his B.S. degree (Summa Cum Laude) in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto. His expertise and interests span the areas of cyber-physical systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and intelligent autonomous systems, healthcare technologies, human-machine interactions, multi-robot systems, systems dynamics and control, mechatronics design, and novel sensing and actuation. His research program was supported by a wide variety of government agencies, and he has authored and co-authored more than 175 peer-reviewed journal articles and refereed papers in conference proceedings and is the named inventor on twelve U.S. patents and patent applications. He is the recipient of several teaching, research and professional service excellence awards, and served on various journal and conference editorial boards as editor and associate editor. As an avid researcher and educator, he spearheaded various curricular STEM infrastructure development and improvement initiatives and engaged in a multitude of STEM outreach activities. Dr. Ben-Tzvi is a Fellow of ASME and a senior member of IEEE. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his family, reading books, listening to music, baking and cooking, watching documentaries and science fiction movies, traveling, and exercising.