Crane Receives Packard Fellowship

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has announced that Keenan Crane , assistant professor of computer science and robotics , is one of 18 recipients of 2018 Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. The fellowship recognizes innovative early-career researchers and includes $875,000 to aid in each fellow's research for five years. Crane's research explores how the shapes and motions observed in nature can be faithfully expressed in a language that is completely finite and discrete, and hence be understood by a computer. His exploration of this question provides both new foundations for computation, as well as new ways to turn digital designs into physical, shape-shifting matter. At CMU, his work has included computational tools for translating complex 3D designs into mechanisms that can be built by cutting, bending, inflating, or milling physical material, as well as fundamental algorithms for understanding geometric data. Crane joined the CMU faculty in 2015. He earned a Ph.D.