Matthew Johnson-Roberson was recently appointed inaugural dean of the College of Connected Computing, following his previous role as director of Carnegie Mellon University’s renowned Robotics Institute. Johnson-Roberson’s appointment began May 1. The Hustler sat down with him to discuss his new position and his vision for the new college, which will welcome its first graduate students in the 2026-27 academic year and first undergraduate class the following year.

The Vanderbilt Hustler: Explain your background. How did your professional experiences lead you to a role like this? 

Johnson-Roberson: I went to undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, a while ago now. I studied computer science, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with that. I got involved in these really big projects called the DARPA Grand Challenges, which were these desert races from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where we were trying to build autonomous vehicles that would drive across the desert without anybody in them. And this was in the really early days of driving cars with respect to commercialization, and so it was just super exciting.

I was really young, and I felt like I had all this responsibility. This made me think about what I wanted to do with my career, and I decided I wanted to be a roboticist. 

Once the project wrapped up, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. I really wanted an adventure. I decided to go to graduate school down in Sydney, Australia, which was super far away, and I didn’t know anyone in Australia. I moved to Sydney and had a great experience working on robots that do deep water inspecting and coral reefs. So we were focused on the east and west coasts of Australia, so that’s the Ningaloo Reef on the west coast and the Great Barrier Reef on the east coast. But we expanded that program to do reef monitoring in a whole variety of places around the world. It was just a really, really exciting experience. I got to go on boats. I got to put robots in water. I got to move the robots. That was great. 

I came back to the United States after that and took a job at the University of Michigan, and there I got the opportunity to work with a bunch of great people, but one of them was the Ford Motor Company. They were really interested in trying to commercialize where self-driving was going, as it had sort of advanced a lot from what had been happening in the early days of 2004. That was super, super fun. I got to lead this really, really interesting center, thinking about how we can do long-term research, thinking about where [autonomous vehicles] were going and what was gonna come around the bend in sort of five or ten years. That was a really excellent experience.

Also, while I was at Michigan, we set up a robotics department because when I come to Michigan, there was no robotics department. I got to serve on the executive committee there and help a lot with them trying to set that up. I think that really gave me this really great experience of what it is to try to build something new. And along the way, I got to do some startups. So I worked on a startup that was building robot food delivery; we were down in Austin, [Texas] and then also in Ann Arbor, [Michigan].

Those were all really great experiences, and that sort of led me to academic administration. So I came into CMU from Michigan to lead their robotics department, which was the largest robotics department in the world. And it was a great and super awesome experience with just a bunch of amazing roboticists.

I’ve spent my career trying to figure out ways to help people get barriers out of their way, be more successful and hopefully give them the opportunities that people gave me when I was coming up. Vanderbilt is such an amazing school, and I thought for the moment we’re at right now with respect to computing, it seemed like such a great opportunity.

Throughout your career, what has motivated your interest in combining industry — like [artificial intelligence], computing, machine learning — with academia?

One of the reasons I wanted to be a professor is that I think universities are the most amazing place to create new ideas and new knowledge and to disseminate that knowledge to people that want to learn. Unlike companies or other organizations, universities’ sole reason for existing is to create knowledge and to give it to people. That is just a fundamentally powerful mission. Obviously, I love working with companies, and I think that companies have actually been able to do a lot to accelerate AI, machine learning and robotics in the last 15 years. But there’s something that I think is so fundamentally exciting and exploratory to be out on the frontier of new knowledge, and I think that’s really where universities excel.

That’s why I want to be part of building something new here at Vanderbilt, but also why I’ve stayed in academia for my whole career, really. Even when I work with companies or do startups, my home is really being an academic. And I think that’s because I believe in that mission more than anything else. We’re not driven by profit. We’re not driven by shareholders. We’re not driven by any of that. We’re driven by this sort of very simple mission to create and disseminate knowledge. I think that’s one of the most important things we can do in our society. 

What do you see as the role of this new college? Why is it important?

We’re at this crossroads moment for computing and for AI in society, particularly at universities. I think there was a lot of foresight and a lot of planning that went into this creation. I think it’s incredibly important for places like Vanderbilt, liberal arts colleges and universities in general that are trying to do broad-based education, to think about how AI is going to change so much of other disciplines. That is why I think this model is so interesting to me.

Again, there’s so many facets to universities, so many facets of study, so many students that want to study all kinds of things that get them excited. One of the phenomena in the last 10 or 15 years is this incredible increase in students going into computing-related majors, engineering-related majors, and that’s great and amazing. 

But one of the things I’m hoping for is to figure out a way that people can pursue their passions, which may be to do engineering or computing for computing’s sake, but maybe it is something else. Maybe they want to be an artist. [It’s about] teaching the skills of how to understand this new technology, particularly AI. I think it’s just a great opportunity to figure out how computing is going to be part of all of these other disciplines that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Computing is still so young relative to all of that.

In recent years, we’ve seen the development of technology with respect to AI expand rapidly. How do you think the college will serve this continuing development?

It’s a really hard problem, right? A good and bad thing about universities is that they are old and fairly slow to change, but I think in good ways a lot of times. They have this consistency and this through line because they can be 50, 100, 200 years old. Universities are good at providing continuity in thinking about ways of framing problems, teaching people how to solve problems, critical thinking — all these skills that we know are really, really important.

And so I think my challenge, and the challenge that everybody in CCC is gonna have, is how to balance both of those aspects. How do we balance being really nimble because things are changing, like day to day. Models will change in a week or two weeks, and have all these new capabilities and all these new risks and all these new implications. It’s about teaching not just how to use the model, but also how to think about technology in such a way that when changes happen, that they’re in the best position they could be. 

If you’re thinking about graduating and going out in the job market, it’s such a crazy time where things are changing so rapidly. People that graduated a year or two before you had this job market experience, and now we have this different job market experience. And so I just think that we have to do a really good job of making students really aware of how to use things that change on a weekly basis, but more importantly, build a robustness to both the technology itself. But it’s also building sort of an adaptability and a determination, these things that I think you really need to survive in the modern professional world, job world, whatever people are going off to do for their studies. I think it’s finding that blend, but it’s frankly very challenging.

I think it’s a really hard time to be a student. This rate of change is hard. It’s pretty easy once you’ve established your career to weather these changes. But for young people thinking about the economy, housing, the job market and all these things, you haven’t gotten a chance to establish yourself yet. [We’re thinking about] how do we get you to the point where you can sit back and pontificate.

Can you share a few goals you have entering the dean role?

So one of the things we want to do is spin out the college. We’re really lucky to be inheriting a lot of faculty that are coming from other units, and so we’re not starting from zero. But it’s really about thinking about how do we offer great courses? How do we offer new graduate programs? How do we think about undergraduate experiences, immersion experiences that really speak to what we think the CCC has to offer? And then, most importantly, how do we figure out how we weave AI, machine learning and computing into all of these other programs that are so great and so rich and have all these things going on? People came here to study those things for the most part because we didn’t exist when they would have applied to school. And so how do we think about supporting those, growing those and really offering value. 

So concretely, we’re going to hire more new faculty. I’m going to try to offer a new graduate program that really speaks to this moment, what’s happening in AI, machine learning and computing more broadly. We’re going to try to partner with the other colleges to really offer experiences that enhance the existing disciplines in ways that make them sort of cutting edge, more competitive for graduate school, better citizens, whatever it may be. And then finally, we’re really just going to try to build a community. So I want to have talks. I want to invite speakers. I want to have coffee hours, performances, socials. I want to do things to make people feel like they have a home in the CCC. 

What does a “successful” outcome for the school look like for you? What is your long-term vision for the college?

My long-term vision is that we have faculty that are doing research that gets students and the world excited, that we can talk about and show off to let people know the awesome things that we’re doing here in computing. So a successful year will be a bunch of hopefully new stories and papers and interviews and all the things that kind of get the word out on what we’re doing. I think from an internally-facing perspective, I want to see that we hire new professors and help them get tenure and promotions so they develop in their careers. I think a successful year would be placing our graduates in jobs that they want to be in and doing the kind of things that they want to do. 

For the people that are not graduating yet and are still here, I think it’s getting them internships or immersion experiences or other things that really enrich their time in college, so they can look back on that and say, ‘I really learned things and these are things that made a difference.’ I think in 10 years, I want to look back and say that we’ve had a really significant impact on parts of society. The kind of work we do [may be] looking at trying to reduce road fatalities on highways, thinking about the future of astrophysics and technology, discovering planets, figuring out where black holes are, composing music with AI. How do we bring AI into the classroom without ruining the teacher-student experience? How do we develop full and complete students that have rich social skills and all the things they need to thrive in the world? I can keep going, but those are a bunch of things that get me really excited.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Building this is really about what the community wants. So I really just hope that people read this story and talk to me or any of the faculty we have that are all amazing and say, ‘this is what I want the CCC to be.’ That’s just hugely important. I just want to know what people want to get out of this so that we’re providing something useful and hopefully meaningful to everyone. I hope people come talk to us. I want to be really available and approachable and just let people know that they have a home in the CCC if they want one and that we’re really just here to make everyone’s learning experiences better.