Previously, Balch was on the faculty of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Balch’s research focuses on behavior-based control, motion planning, and building reliable, large-scale multi-robot and multi-agent systems. In recent work he is developing algorithms for observing and modeling the behavior of multi-agent systems, and in particular, social insect colonies. He has published more than 70 technical articles in journals, magazines, and refereed conference proceedings. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2003. Balch received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in 1998. Balch is a member of the Board of Trustees of the RoboCup Federation, where he works to support robotics education and (friendly) competition. He created TeamBots, a Java-based, easy-to-use robotics development environment for education.