Emanuel (Emo) Vassilev Todorov (born 1971), a neuroscientist, is an associate professor and director of the Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington. He introduced the use of optimal control as a formal explanatory framework for biological movement (see below). He is the principal developer of the physics engine. Todorov completed his PhD in MIT under the supervision of Michael Jordan and Whitman Richards. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the at UCL under Peter Dayan and Geoffrey Hinton. He is a recipient of the 2004 Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience.