Eric N. Johnson is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and Director of the PSU UAS Research Laboratory (PURL). He received a B.S. degree from University of Washington, M.S. degrees from MIT and The George Washington University, and a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, all in Aerospace Engineering. He also has five years of industry experience working at Lockheed Martin and Draper.

As faculty since 2001, he has performed research in adaptive flight control, aided inertial navigation, and autonomous systems. He was the lead system integrator for rotorcraft experiments for the DARPA Software Enabled Control program, which included the first air-launch of a hovering aircraft, automatic flight of a helicopter with a simulated frozen actuator, and adaptive flight control. He was the principal investigator of the Active Vision Control Systems AFOSR Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), which culminated in vision-based air-to-air tracking and vision-aided inertial navigation experimental validation. His most recent work has included automatic low altitude high speed flight of helicopters, indoor and outdoor vision-aided inertial navigation, and methods for sensing and avoiding other aircraft.