Manufacturing Day 2026

Professor of Aerospace Engineering at MIT, David is an expert on robotic navigation and human interactions with autonomous systems in air, sea, and space. As Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, David is a leading authority on generations of inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and workers within the great arcs of technological change that make them successful. 

David has undergraduate degrees from Yale and a Ph.D. from MIT. He has led or participated in more than 25 oceanographic expeditions, written seven books, and is an inventor on 34 patents in RF navigation, autonomous systems, and AI-assisted piloting. He also spent five years as a Department Head at MIT. David co- Chaired MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future, and is the author, with David Autor and Elizabeth Reynolds, of The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT Press, 2022). His latest book is The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution (MIT Press, 2025).

He is also the Founder and Executive Chair of Humatics Corporation, which develops technologies to transform how robots and autonomous systems work in human environments, and co-founder and Partner at Unless, a new investment firm focused on supporting companies at the forefront of industrial transformation.