Brennan Sellner

Brennan Sellner is the Vice President of Engineering of BioForge, where he is responsible for the implementation and operations of BioForge’s research and development activities.  He has a deep background in leadership, robotics, and complex systems, a willingness to tackle any problem, and an insatiable curiosity.  This provides a unique viewpoint into the biotech space, where he looks forward to advancing the state of the art in development and manufacturing.

Previously, Brennan served in a series of leadership roles at Seegrid, a leading manufacturer of autonomous mobile robots focused on the logistics and manufacturing domains.  Over fourteen years, he built and led five software teams or groups and contributed significantly to Seegrid’s rapid growth and market leadership.  Most recently, he championed and created a cross-functional research and development group that tackled a diverse set of problems, spanning novel detection systems to innovations in sensing to transformational approaches to simulation.  Brennan scaled up Seegrid’s IP strategy and drove its implementation, resulting in a 4x increase in annualized patent filings.  He co-led a departmental transition to a scaled Kanban work system, increasing development efficiency, velocity, and transparency.

For three years prior, Brennan rebuilt and led Seegrid’s Perception team after a series of key departures.  The team is responsible for all sensing and localization aspects of Seegrid’s line of robotics, and was able to double the update rate of the primary localization system, among other advances.

Brennan was the co-inventor and lead developer of Seegrid Supervisor (now Fleet Central), a centralized robot control and coordination system that yielded a 24x increase in robot fleet and deal sizes.  By enabling fleet-scale operations, the product drove $320M in sales and enabled dozens of new customer applications.

Early in his career at Seegrid, Brennan assumed leadership of the core robotics software team, responsible for all on-robot software.  Focusing on safety and functionality, the team built a system and architecture that drove a range of large-scale robots, maneuvering payloads of up to 4 tons.  By the time Brennan joined BioForge, the resulting fleet had traveled more than 12 million miles in production without a human safety incident.

Brennan earned a Ph.D. in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, where his thesis work focused on proactive replanning to optimize the effectiveness of multi-robot teams.  He also contributed to projects involving multi-robot assembly for NASA, distributed robotic architectures, the Roboceptionist (a social robotics project in collaboration with the Drama department), and investigations into sliding autonomy to integrate remote operators into robotics teams, among others.

In his spare time, Brennan volunteers as the Treasurer and Director of Operations for Resonance Works, a genre-defying performing arts organization, where he is responsible for production management, set construction, and finances.  He resides in Pittsburgh with his wife, Maria Sensi Sellner, and their Havanese, Lucy.