Scott Niekum directs the Personal Autonomous Robotics Lab (PeARL) at the University of Texas and is a core faculty member in the interdepartmental robotics group. Prior to joining UT Austin, Niekum was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. He received his PhD in computer science in September 2013 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, under the supervision of Andrew Barto. His research interests include learning from demonstration, robotic manipulation, human-robot interaction, time-series analysis, and reinforcement learning.