Ludovic Righetti is jointly appointed in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the Tandon School of Engineering of New York University. He is also holder of an International Chair at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute. He co-created and co-directs the Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence. He is also a member of the Center for Responsible AI, Center for Urban Science and Progress and Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications.

He leads the Machines in Motion Laboratory, where his research focuses on the planning and control of movements for autonomous robots, with a special emphasis on legged locomotion and manipulation. He is more broadly interested in questions at the intersection of decision-making, automatic control, optimization, applied dynamical systems and machine learning and their application to physical systems. He also cares about the societal implications of his work and more broadly he is interested in use of technology that can empower people, improve quality of life and help create more just, open and equal societies.

He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) where he received an engineering diploma in Computer Science (eq. M.Sc.) and a Doctorate in Science under the supervision of Professor Auke Ijspeert. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab with Professor Stefan Schaal (University of Southern California) and a independent research group leader at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. He moved to New York University in September 2017.

He has received several awards, most notably the 2010 Georges Giralt PhD Award given by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) for the best robotics thesis in Europe, the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Best Paper Award, the 2016 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, the 2016 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize from the German Research Foundation and NYU’s 2024 Jacobs Excellence in Education Innovation Award.