Rate My Professor Sabine Hauert

Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering in the School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology at the University of Bristol. She earned her BSc (2001-2004), MSc (2005-2006), and PhD (2006-2011) in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland, with her doctoral thesis titled 'Evolutionary Synthesis of Communication-Based Aerial Swarms' supervised by Professors Dario Floreano and Jean-Christophe Zufferey. She participated in an exchange program at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004-2005. Following her PhD, Hauert was a Human Frontier Science Program Cross-disciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT from 2011 to 2014, where she designed cooperative nanoparticles for cancer treatment using machine learning and crowdsourcing, validated in vitro using tissue-on-a-chip constructs under the supervision of Professor Sangeeta Bhatia. She joined the University of Bristol in 2014 as Lecturer in Robotics, progressed to Senior Lecturer in 2019, Associate Professor (Reader) of Swarm Engineering in 2020, and currently holds the position of Professor.

Hauert's research centers on swarm engineering across scales, developing trustworthy robot swarms for real-world applications such as nanorobots for cancer treatment and wound healing, drone swarms for wildfire detection and mitigation, and swarms for warehouse logistics and last-mile delivery. As principal investigator, she has secured over £40 million in funding, including the Co-AIMS Research Hub on Collaborative AI for Manufacturing Sustainability (2025-2032) and Trustworthy Robot Swarms to Power City-Scale Logistics (2025-2030). Her key publications include 'DRESS: Distributed Robotic Enhanced Soft System for Non-Uniform Object Transportation' (2026, IEEE RoboSoft), 'Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning of a Fault-Robust Controller in an Intralogistics Robot Swarm' (2026, ANTS), and 'Scalable real-time multi-UAV coverage path planning for large geographical areas' (2026, ICAR). She received the DARS'24 Best Paper Award and an honorary OBE in February 2026 for services to robotics. Hauert is President and Co-founder of Robohub.org, executive trustee of AIhub.org, and has contributed to the UK Robotics Growth Partnership and IEEE RAS executive boards.