Kelly Smith

Kelly Smith has a diverse work experience in the field of robotics and aerospace engineering. Most recently, they worked at Kodiak Robotics as the Lead Systems Engineer for Autonomy since June 2023. Prior to that, they were at Embark Trucks, where they held multiple roles including Senior System Engineer and Engineering Consultant from January 2020 to June 2023. At Embark, they developed the Embark Driverless Safety Case, a sensor simulator, and a Safety & Mission Assurance analytical model. They also designed the Embark Driverless compute architecture and built the pipeline for verifying the ADS system behavior.

Before joining Embark, Kelly had a long tenure at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, starting in 2008 as a Cooperative Education Student. From 2010 to 2021, they held various positions at NASA, including Orion Backup Flight Software Lead for Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2) and Aerospace Engineer. In these roles, they were responsible for project management, software development, algorithm development, and unit testing for the Orion spacecraft. They supported the lead-up to Artemis 1 and the Flight Operations team for Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1).

Overall, Kelly Smith has demonstrated expertise in systems engineering, software development, and project management in the fields of robotics and space exploration.

Kelly Smith completed a Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University between the years 2005 and 2010. Kelly then pursued a Master of Science (M.S.) degree in Computer Science, with a focus on Computational Perception and Robotics, at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2016 to 2020. Additionally, Kelly also attained a Self-Driving Car Nanodegree from Udacity in the field of Autonomous Vehicles during the year 2016 to 2017.