News Releases

Jim Bellingham, a pioneer in the worldwide autonomous marine robotics field who has led research expeditions from the Arctic to the Antarctic, has been appointed executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy (IAA) in Baltimore, run jointly by Johns Hopkins APL and the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. For more than 30 years, Bellingham has been a global leader in the development of small, high-performance autonomous underwater vehicles, resulting in a class of systems that are now widely used within the military, industry and science communities.

A search for precision led Pedro Rodriguez into his career as an electrical engineer, but because of his insights into new possibilities, he now helps lead Johns Hopkins APL’s AI and machine-learning efforts. Today, he sees the potential power and precision of artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools as keys to better protect a changing world.

As COVID-19 cases multiplied in early 2020, so too did the number of users turning to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard, which tracked global cases of COVID-19 in real time and quickly became the go-to source for the public, the news media and even the U.S. government. But the system’s early infrastructure buckled under the sheer proliferation of data as cases continued to explode worldwide. This is the story of how the most trusted, accurate source of information available on the pandemic came to be, and how it became the data source relied upon globally for near-real-time tracking of the biggest health crisis this century.

The Honorable Ellen M. Lord, former undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment in the Department of Defense, has joined APL as a Senior Fellow.

APL and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) have signed a memorandum of understanding, formalizing a collaborative relationship between the nonprofit organizations.

NASA’s New Horizons is reaching a rare deep-space milepost — 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. The Johns Hopkins APL-operated New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to reach this great distance, following the legendary Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captured the first complete view of Venus’ dust ring, a band of particles that stretches for the entirety of the planet’s path around the Sun.

Learning to become independent sometimes means asking for help.

NASA's Europa Clipper mission has passed a significant milestone, completing its Critical Design Review. Being developed by Johns Hopkins APL and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the mission can now start to assemble and test the spacecraft and its payload of sophisticated science instruments.