Faculty Members Hartzell and Otte Promoted

faculty

Department of Aerospace Engineering faculty members Christine Hartzell and Michael Otte were promoted to the ranks of Professor and Associate Professor respectively, with tenure.

Hartzell is a Minta Martin Professor and director of the University of Maryland’s newly created center for space exploration research, the Center for Advanced Space Science and Technology Research at UMD (ASTRA-UMD).

Her research seeks to understand the fundamental physics of granular systems that will enable key space exploration technologies. She is a Participating Scientist on the Martian Moons Exploration mission, and was involved with both the OSIRIS-REx mission and the Janus mission.

Asteroid 9319 was named “Hartzell” in recognition of her contributions to the field of asteroid science.

Prior to joining the faculty at UMD, Hartzell was a Keck Institute for Space Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. She completed her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Otte is the director of the Motion and Teaming Lab and holds affiliations with the UMD Department of Computer Science, the Maryland Robotics Center (MRC), the MATRIX Lab, and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM).

He is a Senior member of IEEE and AIAA, Associate Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), and served as a co-chair of the International Workshop on Robot Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics and Program Chair of the International Conference on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems.

Otte was previously a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Associate in the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, a visiting Scholar at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder in computer science and received dual B.S. Degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Computer Science with a minor in mathematics from Clarkson University.

Published June 18, 2025