Keenan Burnett (EngSci 1T6+PEY, UTIAS PhD 2T4) is the recipient of the 2025 Gordon N Patterson (GNP) Student Award — the most prestigious recognition alumni of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) can receive.
Established in 1974 in recognition of the institute’s founding director, the award celebrates a recently graduated doctoral student who has made significant contributions to their research area.
“Keenan embodies the principles Patterson stood for,” says Professor Tim Barfoot, Burnett’s MASc and PhD supervisor, and the 2025 GNP lecturer.
“Throughout his graduate studies, Keenan demonstrated equal skill in both theory and experiments, which are the principles UTIAS was founded on. Keenan was also an incredible team player and student leader. It was an honour to present him with the 2025 GNP Student Award and recognize him for his leadership.”
Burnett’s research contributed to one of the biggest challenges in autonomous driving: making self-driving vehicles operable, reliable and predictable in all-weather conditions, including harsh Canadian winters.
By exploring many methods of radar-based navigation to improve localization and mapping for autonomous driving, Burnett became known as the ‘radar guy’ in the robotics community. He made several contributions to the field, including radar-inertial state estimation, compensating for motion distortion and Doppler effects in radar estimation.
This research resulted in eight first-author papers, 600 citations on Google Scholar, and a widely used radar dataset and benchmarking suite.
While completing his graduate studies, Burnett also led U of T’s award-winning self-driving car team, aUToronto, leading them to first place in the SAE Autodrive Challenge for two consecutive years.
Today, Burnett is a Staff Researcher at Waabi — a leading autonomous transportation technology company — where he works on novel sensor simulation and making localization more robust as a member of the mapping and localization team.
“I greatly appreciate the recognition of receiving the GNP award, especially considering that there were numerous other well-deserving students this year,” says Burnett. “It has been an exciting year with my defense in March and convocation in June, so this is a nice capstone for my time at U of T.”
Written by Amanda Hacio
