Ian D. Walker received the B.Sc. Degree (First Class Honours) in Mathematics from the University of Hull, England, in 1983 and the M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985 and 1989, respectively. He then joined the faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, where he was an Assistant Professor from 1989 to 1995, and a tenured Associate Professor from 1995 to 1997. In the fall of 1997, he moved to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University, where he became a full Professor in 2001.

Professor Walker is a Fellow of the IEEE and an Associate Fellow of the AIAA. He served as Vice President for Financial Activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2006-2009, and from 2006-2008 served as Chair of the AIAA Technical Committee on Space Automation and Robotics. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Soft Robotics. He has served on the Editorial Boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the International Journal of Robotics and Automation, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and the International Journal of Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacturing. His research has been funded by DARPA, the National Science Foundation, NASA, NASA/EPSCoR, NSF/EPSCoR, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, South Carolina Commission of Higher Education, Sandia National Laboratories, and Westinghouse Hanford Company.

Professor Walker's research centers on robotics, particularly novel continuous backbone "continuum" and soft robots. His group is conducting basic research in the design, modeling, and application of biologically inspired "tongue, trunk, and tentacle" robots. For example, work on octopus-inspired continuum robots has been funded under the DARPA DSO BIODYNOTICS program. Work on vine-inspired long thin tendril-like robots has been funded by NASA under the U.S. National Robotics Initiative program, and by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Walker's Google Scholar page.

Another focus of Professor Walker's research is on Architectural Robotics, the use of robotics to create novel (physical) spaces, for example Animated Workspace Environments (AWE), an Assistive Robotic Table (ART), and a robotic LIT ROOM for investigating environmental effects on literacy in young children. This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
 

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