Sam Burden
Sam is a Washington native and first-generation college graduate -- he was born near Forks on the Olympic Peninsula and grew up in Cheney on the Palouse. After a transformative experience in the vibrant intellectual community of the inaugural SIMUW cohort (2003), he decided to go to college to study math. But after working in a robotics research lab, he switched majors and earned his BS with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2008. Sam earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California in Berkeley in 2014, where he subsequently spent one year as a Postdoctoral Scholar. In 2015, Sam returned to UW EE (now ECE) as an Assistant Professor.
Sam has received awards for his research, including a Young Investigator Program award from the Army Research Office (2016) for his work on legged robotics and an Early Faculty Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (2021) for his work on human-in-the-loop control systems. But he is especially proud of receiving the Junior Faculty Award from the UW College of Engineering (2021) for service to his students and University, and for his recent appointment as the (first) Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in UW ECE.
Sam is broadly interested in discovering and formalizing principles of sensorimotor control. Specifically, he focuses on applications in robotics, neuroengineering, and (human-)cyber-physical systems. In his spare time, he teaches students of all ages in classrooms and campus events.