May Mobility

Edwin Olson is a roboticist who came to autonomous vehicles through academia. He earned his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2008, having cut his teeth on the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge as part of the MIT team. He then joined the University of Michigan faculty, where he led the APRIL robotics lab, earned tenure as an associate professor in 2014, and worked with Ford on autonomous vehicle research. In 2016 he became co-director of autonomous driving development at the newly established Toyota Research Institute in Ann Arbor while retaining a part-time faculty position. In early 2017 Olson left TRI to co-found May Mobility in Ann Arbor with Alisyn Malek and Steve Vozar, betting that short, fixed-route autonomous shuttle services could reach commercial deployment faster than general-purpose robotaxis. As CEO he has led the company from its first commercial self-driving shuttle deployments to multi-city transit partnerships, while maintaining his affiliation with the University of Michigan.

Alisyn Malek spent her early career at General Motors, first as an automotive engineer leading a global team developing advanced charging technology for the Spark and Bolt EV programs, then as an investment manager at GM Ventures, where she led the automaker's investments in the autonomous space — including the early negotiations with Cruise — before heading GM's innovation pipeline. Smithsonian named her a top ten female innovator to watch in 2018. In 2017 she co-founded May Mobility with Edwin Olson and Steve Vozar, serving as COO, where she ran operations and led fundraising for the autonomous shuttle startup. She left May Mobility in early 2020 and in July 2020 became executive director of the Coalition for Reimagined Mobility, a policy-focused transportation group. She has since founded Middle Third, a boutique mobility consultancy she leads as CEO, and authored the book *Intersection: Reimagining the Future of Mobility Across Traditional Boundaries*.

Steve Vozar earned his PhD at the University of Michigan — Edwin Olson sat on his committee — and was named a Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer in 2012 for his doctoral work on tele-robotic mobile manipulation. His earlier career included developing tele-robotic satellite-servicing technology with NASA at Johns Hopkins University and co-founding Absolute Nano, a university spin-off building instruments for nanomaterials research that won a 2009 R&D 100 Award. As a research fellow with Michigan's APRIL and PeRL labs he developed robotic systems for Ford's next-generation autonomous vehicle program and DARPA's Squad X Core Technologies program. In 2017 he co-founded May Mobility with Olson and Alisyn Malek, serving as CTO and leading the technology team that deployed the first commercial fleet of self-driving shuttles in the United States, with responsibility spanning product, hardware, software, autonomy, and vehicle production. He later departed May Mobility and is now a technical lead manager for fallbacks and reliability at Waymo.