Before joining the faculty at the University of California, Davis in 2012, Stephen Robinson spent 37 years at NASA, where he worked as a technician, engineer, research scientist, pilot, and astronaut. Robinson is now a tenured professor in the UC Davis Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department and serves as the Director of the UC Davis Center for Spaceflight Research, where graduate and undergraduate students pursue research in human spaceflight, AI-based spacecraft autonomy, spacecraft design for human safety, human/autonomy/robotic integration, human performance, lunar surface operations, and CubeSat and UAV design. 

During his 17 years as a NASA Astronaut, Dr. Robinson flew on four space shuttle missions, performed three spacewalks, visited the ISS twice, and trained in Star City, Russia. He has extensive research expertise in spacecraft systems, human/systems teaming, operational safety, space robotics, autonomous systems, experiment design, aerodynamics, and computational turbulence physics. Dr. Robinson’s engineering degrees are from UC Davis (double BS) and Stanford (MS & PhD), with additional academic research at Princeton and MIT.

Dr. Robinson is an active pilot, an artist, and a multi-instrument musician – he currently plays with the mostly-astronaut folk-music band Bandella, and the all-astronaut rock band Max Q.