Dr. Nathan Jacobs earned a B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Missouri (1999) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis (2010). He is a Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering department, where he is the Director of the Multimodal Vision Research Laboratory. He also serves as Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence, co-leading WashU's +AI Initiative and serving as faculty co-lead of the Digital Intelligence and Innovation Accelerator (DI2), helping shape the university's strategy for advancing AI-enabled research, developing shared AI infrastructure, and fostering partnerships that accelerate innovation across academia and industry. Dr. Jacobs remains an active researcher; his specialty is developing learning-based algorithms and systems for processing large-scale image collections. His current focus is representation learning, geospatial AI, and generative modeling for satellite, aerial, and ground imagery—methods that also extend to audio, text, and structured data, with applications in biodiversity and conservation, agriculture, environmental monitoring, the built environment, and transportation safety. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2016 for his work at the intersection of computer vision, video surveillance, and remote sensing. In addition, his research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Taylor Geospatial, and Google.
