Alumni Profile: Chris Foley ’12

Chris Foley ’12

Building a Future for Autonomous Vehicles

Chris Foley ’12 first discovered his passion for writing code in high school when a friend sent him a link to a coding website. He knew he wanted to pursue a career that involved coding moving objects, but had no idea what specific field would lead him down that path until he began Googling job titles and found computer engineering was the answer.

While studying computer engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Chris took part in an internship at a robotics company that focused on warehouse automation and

“I’ve found that immersing yourself in multiple disciplines makes it easier to learn highlevel concepts, and Langley provided me with a solid foundation in many different areas.” discovered how much he loved the challenge of robotics. He soon applied to UPenn’s master’s program in robotics engineering and concurrently earned a bachelor’s in computer engineering and a master’s in robotics engineering during his four years there. Chris’ ability to write generic code along with his understanding of robotics principles made him extremely marketable, and he was recruited by tech companies around the country. After seven rounds of interviews, he accepted a job as an infrastructure software engineer at Nuro, a start-up in Mountain View, CA, that makes fully autonomous, on-road vehicles designed to deliver everything from dinner to dry cleaning. “I chose Nuro because it’s a relatively small company and my position there will allow me to interact with people across disciplines as we work to use autonomous vehicle

technology to solve new problems,” says Chris, who will begin his job in July. Nuro’s autonomous delivery vehicles are currently deployed in strictly suburban areas of Houston and in parts of California, and Chris will help refine the technology to ensure the vehicles operate safely as the company expands to other geographic areas.

“Autonomous vehicles will be the future,” he says. “While some people assume self-driving cars are dangerous, we have the technology for them to run safely. The real problem arises when these vehicles encounter aggressive drivers of non-autonomous cars. The social impacts of this scenario will have to be addressed before we can begin to put self-driving cars on our highways.”

Before he discovered computer engineering, Chris was a student at Langley for 10 years beginning in junior kindergarten. His favorite memories center around playing clarinet in the band, taking part in dramatic productions both as an actor and on the tech crew, learning Minecraft coding with Langley friends during breaks, and doing exciting chemistry experiments in Mr. Musgrove’s science

classes that helped develop his interest in science. Chris credits his sixth-grade study skills class with helping him learn valuable organizational skills he still uses to this day, and he notes that the well-rounded education he received at Langley has paid off in unexpected ways. “I’ve found that immersing yourself in multiple disciplines makes it easier to learn high-level concepts, and Langley provided me with a solid foundation in many different areas,” he adds. “For example, having the music education Langley offered really helped me understand high-level electrical engineering concepts.”

Throughout his educational career, Chris has always enjoyed taking on a new challenge and solving a new problem. His professional career will likely be no different as he embarks on this new adventure in California. Already looking to the future, he hopes to one day take on a research and development role in the robotics field, perhaps working on drones or robots with legs because of the unique challenges those projects would present.