Dr. Michael Novitzky, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael (Misha) Novitzky is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, New York. He is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research affiliate. 

He joined USMA in October 2019 as part of the Robotics Research Center housed in EECS and established the Human-Robot Teaming Laboratory. Dr. Novitzky’s focus is on human-machine teaming for cooperative tasks in stressful and unconstrained environments.

Before joining West Point, he was a postdoctoral research associate (2015-17) and then a research scientist (2017-19) at MIT in the Laboratory for Marine Sensing Systems. While there, he led the Project Aquaticus testbed in which humans and fully autonomous robots were embedded in the marine environment and played games of "capture the flag" against similarly situated teams. 

Dr. Novitzky studied multi-robot teams at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2015, Master of Science in electrical and computer engineering in 2014, and Master of Science in computer science in 2009. Before becoming fascinated by robots, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology at Colorado College in 2003. 

When not working on robots, he supports cadet clubs, including the combatives team and the Future Applied Systems Team.