Samantha Johnson, robotics CEO, to be Boston Convocation featured alumni speaker
Samantha Johnson is the founder and CEO of Tatum Robotics, which develops robots to help the DeafBlind community. She is also the featured alumni speaker at Boston Convocation.
Samantha Johnson remembers attending convocation as a new student at Northeastern and hearing President Joseph E. Aoun tell students to “robot-proof” themselves.
“The big takeaway was… how do you ensure that robots don’t take your job,” said Johnson, who graduated in 2021 with a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in bioengineering.
Aoun is the author of the book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
This year Johnson returns to convocation with a slightly different take on robots. She develops them.
“I always think it’s funny because, at the end of the day, I actually ended up making more robots,” Johnson told Northeastern Global News in a recent interview.
Johnson is the founder and CEO of Tatum Robotics, which develops robots to help the DeafBlind community. She is also the featured alumni speaker at Boston Convocation, a ceremony to kick off the 2026-2027 academic year which will be held Tuesday, Sept. 8, at 11 a.m. EDT at MGM Music Hall at Fenway.
“Samantha embodies the power of entrepreneurship,” said Betsy Ludwig, executive director of women’s entrepreneurship at Northeastern. “She illustrates that Northeastern is where people learn to build, disrupt, and lead.”
It’s been a busy few years since Johnson, a 2022 Women Who Empower Innovator, last checked in with NGN.
Tatum Robotics, a company Johnson spun-out from her master’s thesis at Northeastern, has grown to ten full-time employees, raised a couple million dollars in funding and brought their first product to market: a robotic smartphone for people who are deaf and blind.
Called Tatum1, the phone looks like “a shoebox with a hand sticking out of it,” Johnson said. It enables DeafBlind people to communicate through tactile signing – holding the hand of the person they’re signing with in order to feel the signs being made.
“It connects to Wi-Fi and cloud services and essentially provides all the things that your smartphone or computer could do, but in a way that’s accessible for DeafBlind people in their primary conversational language,” Johnson said.
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The phone accomplishes a promise she first made while at Northeastern.
“When I was working on this for my master’s thesis, the DeafBlind people that I was working with said, ‘you know, you can’t stop now, you haven’t helped us until we have it in our homes,’” Johnson recalled.
Now with Tatum1 out in the world, DeafBlind users are independently making their first doctor appointments, independently calling their families, and reading books for hours on end, Johnson said.
She credits Northeastern among the many who have helped Tatum Robotics make that impact.
A friend she met at the university encouraged her to take an American sign language class, during which she met a DeafBlind person who inspired the idea that became Tatum Robotics.
“Really, the whole impetus of the idea is rooted at Northeastern,” Johnson said. “When I think back to my Northeastern experience, the reason I’m here today is because I was exposed to so many people.”
It’s a message she plans to share with the newest Huskies at convocation.
“What I want to get across to the students is to get involved in as many things as possible, have genuine conversations with people outside your field and use that as you approach the working world going forward,” Johnson said.
It brings her back to another early Northeastern memory: hearing about the incredible things that Northeastern graduates have accomplished.
“You sort of think to yourself, ‘wow, they did amazing things, but that could never be me,’” Johnson said. “Then at the end of the day, Northeastern really gives you the resources to become incredible yourself.”
