Dr. Folsom is an Affiliate Professor in the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Washington. He develops and tests self-driving vehicle technology for cars and for trikes, and teaches on this and related subjects. One of the key events in the development of self-driving cars happened 10 years ago. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held three contests in 2004, 2005 and 2007, offering a $2M prize to a team that could get a car to drive itself across the Mojave desert. Stanford won the 2005 event, and key people from the Stanford team were hired by Google to develop autonomous cars. Dr. Folsom participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge race with Team Sleipnir (Sequim, WA) and in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge with Snowstorm (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada).

Dr. Folsom holds bachelor and masters degrees in mathematics and masters and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. His specialties are robotics, machine vision, and artificial intelligence. He is a project manager at QUEST Integrated, Inc (Qi2), Kent WA. He also teaches Embedded Systems at the University of Washington, Bothell WA, where the main student project is to make an electric tricycle into an automated vehicle.