12 Facts About Chris Urmson

Chris Urmson co-founded Aurora Innovation, a company developing self-driving technology, in 2017 and serves as its CEO.

Chris Urmson was one of the original leaders of Google's self-driving car project, which later spun off into Waymo in 2016.

Chris Urmson was born in Canada in 1976, the son of emigrants from England.

Chris Urmson's father worked for the Correctional Service of Canada and eventually served as the warden of the Kent Institution.

Chris Urmson earned his BSc in computer engineering from the University of Manitoba in 1998 and PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.

Chris Urmson's thesis was entitled "Navigation Regimes for Off-Road Autonomy".

Chris Urmson became a faculty member of the Robotics Institute at CMU, and his research concentrated on motion planning and perception for robotic vehicles.

Chris Urmson served as the technical director of the DARPA Urban and Grand Challenge teams.

Chris Urmson led Google's self-driving car project for nearly eight years, during the time Google vehicles accumulated 1.8 million miles of test driving.

Chris Urmson served as the CTO of X, Google's self-driving car team, joining in 2009 and taking over from Sebastian Thrun as project lead in 2013.

Chris Urmson was the main engineer who built the code running Google's autonomous software.

Chris Urmson founded Aurora Innovation with Sterling Anderson, the former director of Tesla Autopilot, and Drew Bagnell, Uber's former autonomy and perception lead.