The people behind the work.
The people of the Institute for Physical AI: its leadership, the investigators who lead its labs, and the students who build alongside them.
Charles R. Glass, EdD
Executive Director · Bailey Military Institute
Executive Director of Bailey Military Institute, a former Navy officer, Eastern Airlines pilot, and commercial drone pilot, and a career aviator and educator. Dr. Glass leads the Glass Lab and builds the airspace-integration and STEM-workforce programs that connect Physical AI to aviation; his research has been funded by the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Texas Department of Transportation, the Transportation Research Board, and the U.S. Department of Education.
David Jean Charlot, PhD
Dean of Physical AI
Dr. Charlot is a bioengineer and hardware-systems engineer (PhD, UC San Diego) who builds embodied systems and turns them into companies: autonomous UAVs, Edge-AI wearables, and robotic lab-automation platforms among them. As a principal investigator, his research has been awarded more than $2.5M in federal SBIR/STTR funding across the U.S. Army, Air Force, DTRA, and NIH, and he holds 18 U.S. and international patents. Dr. Charlot has founded or co-founded four deep-tech ventures, including C3I Tech, where he built autonomous UAV and secure-access systems with patents filed alongside the U.S. Navy. He leads the Charlot Lab and teaches AI/ML for Edge AI in Python and Rust.
The Charlot Lab →david@physicalai-bmi.orgdavidjcharlot.com ↗LinkedIn ↗
Michael Hiner
Lead · The Hiner Lab
A geologist and geophysicist with more than 40 years in energy and managing partner of TJFM Energy. At BMI, Mr. Hiner leads the Hiner Lab, unmanned systems in the field, and drives STEM and drone-aviation workforce development in Houston.
Darrizett Moore, MBA
Research Development & Grants Administration
Darrizett Moore is a Certified Business Development Professional with a long record of building client revenue and channel partnerships. She began her IT career at IBM, marketing and installing distributed systems and managing business partners across local and regional markets, and later ran business-partner channel programs as a business owner. A native Houstonian and graduate of Jack Yates High School, Mrs. Moore holds a BA in Economics from Spelman College and an MBA in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has long worked to develop business professionalism in Houston youth, with Junior Achievement and Higher Houston Youth, part of the City of Houston Mayor's Office of Education, and brings that to BMI's mission for the responsible, innovative use of drone technology.
Grant Markhart
Corporate Development
Grant Markhart leads corporate development for the Institute. He is the founder of ThinkCouncil, a collective of entrepreneurs, executives, investment bankers, and business development professionals working across healthcare, media, technology, telecommunications, finance, and defense. Before founding it he spent more than ten years at Viasat in strategic partnerships and business development, working on satellite and digital communications for commercial and government markets. Earlier he was VP of Physician Services at Patient Home Monitoring, a healthcare company focused on home-based cardiology care. At the Institute he builds the corporate and commercial relationships that carry the work forward.
Five research areas.
The Institute's research runs across five areas: perception, manipulation, learning & sim-to-real, digital twins, and multi-agent autonomy.
Who builds alongside them.
Students join the labs through internships, hands on the real systems the work runs on.