John Kenneth Salisbury, Jr. (born July 12, 1951, in Schenectady, New York) is an American Roboticist and Research Professor Emeritus at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department and Stanford School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery.

His PhD thesis, Kinematic and Force Analysis of Articulated Hands was advised by Professor Bernard Roth.

[6] From 1982 through 1997, Salisbury served as Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

From 1997 through 2003, he was Fellow and Scientific Advisor at Intuitive Surgical in Mountain View, CA.

He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1999 where his research has focused on the design of robots for interaction with and near humans as well as haptics and surgical simulation.