Chris Urmson

Chris Urmson’s vision is to design hardware and software that will power the next revolution of transportation. Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, where he leads a company dedicated to realizing the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. Chris, has helped advance the state of the art of self-driving vehicles over the last 15 years.  As the former leader, and CTO, of Google’s self-driving car program (now Waymo), Chris helped to build the team and technology that is generally credited as instigating the self-driving industry.

Chris was a faculty member of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. During his time as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, he worked with house size trucks, drove robots around in deserts, and was the technical director of the DARPA Urban and Grand Challenge teams. He earned his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and his BSc in computer engineering from the University of Manitoba in 1998.