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 MuJoCo physics engine. Todorov completed his PhD in MIT under the supervision of Michael Jordan and Whitman Richards. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL under Peter Dayan and Geoffrey Hinton. He is a recipient of the 2004 Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience. In 2002 he proposed that stochastic optimal control principles are a good theoretical framework for explaining biological movement. In 2011 this view was acknowledged by one of its critics, Karl Friston, to have become the dominant paradigm for understanding motor behavior in formal or computational terms. It has been described in the popular scientific press together with o