Samantha Fowler

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About

Dr. Samantha Fowler is a leading researcher in swarm robotics and STEM education, best known for founding the Swarmathon—an autonomous swarm robotics competition that has become a landmark initiative in the field. Her work focuses on developing decentralized coordination algorithms for multi-robot systems, particularly for space exploration applications. The Swarmathon, her most cited work with 12 citations, engages college students from minority-serving institutions in NASA's Journey to Mars by challenging them to program robot teams to autonomously search for, collect, and transport resources. This competition has produced innovative prototypes for autonomous resource collection, demonstrating how swarm intelligence can solve complex real-world problems. Dr. Fowler's contributions extend beyond technical robotics to include significant advances in broadening participation in STEM, as her competition has directly trained hundreds of underrepresented students in robotics programming and systems engineering. Her work bridges the gap between theoretical swarm algorithms and practical deployment, showing how collective robotic systems can operate reliably in unstructured environments. Through the Swarmathon, she has created a replicable model for combining cutting-edge research with impactful education, inspiring a new generation of roboticists while advancing the fundamental science of swarm coordination.