Conrad Tucker is the director of CMU-Africa and associate dean for international affairs-Africa, as well as a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds courtesy faculty appointments in machine learning, robotics, and biomedical engineering. His research focuses on the design and optimization of systems through the acquisition, integration, and mining of large scale, disparate data.
Tucker has served as PI/Co-PI on federally/non-federally funded grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) via the NSF Center for eDesign, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). In February 2016, he was invited by National Academy of Engineering (NAE) President Dr. Dan Mote, to serve as a member of the Advisory Committee for the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) Symposium. He received his Ph.D., M.S. (industrial engineering), and MBA degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.