From apples to army robots, curiosity and commitment define Priya Narayanan’s career
She didn’t exactly experience a Sir Isaac Newton-like epiphany after being conked by a falling apple, but Priya Narayanan, Ph.D. ’08, mechanical engineering, spent a lot of her time at UMBC interacting with the iconic red fruit. For her Ph.D. thesis, Narayanan worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study whether a simple device made of a long, inclined track could reliably orient apples. The ultimate goal was to automate visual inspection of the fruit—using cameras to spot blemishes—and the cameras required the same view of the apple each time. Narayanan spent thousands of hours performing experiments with rolling… Continue Reading From apples to army robots, curiosity and commitment define Priya Narayanan’s career