Jake Welde is an Assistant Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he spent a decade at Penn and the GRASP Lab, where he first completed his bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (working as an undergraduate research assistant in GRASP), followed by his Masters in Robotics and his PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, supervised by Vijay Kumar. During his time at Penn, Jake earned an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and was recognized as an RSS Pioneer. He also received the Outstanding TA Award and the John A. Goff Prize from the MEAM department. In his research, Jake explores the role of differential geometry and dynamical systems theory in control synthesis and design for robotic systems, exploiting structural properties to explainably synthesize efficient controllers, accelerate learning algorithms, and develop more capable robot morphologies. He envisions a future in which robots move through their surroundings as capably and dynamically as their counterparts in Nature.