Lydia Kavraki @ Rice University

Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. She also holds a joint appointment at the Department of Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Kavraki received her B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University working with Jean-Claude Latombe. Her research interests include robot motion planning, assembly planning, micromanipulation, and flexible object manipulation. Kavraki's most recent work has demonstrated how to use sampling-based planners and physics-based simulators to produce realistic paths for robots with drift, under-actuation and complex physical constraints. She has also investigated how to plan for teams of realistic robots in changing or unknown environments, how to plan for hybrid robotic systems, and how to plan for high-level goals specified using linear temporal logic. Kavraki has applied many of the methods she has developed in robotics to computational structural biology and bioinformatics and in particular to the modeling of proteins and biomolecular interactions for computer-assisted drug design and to the large-scale functional annotation of proteins.

Kavraki has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and is one of the authors of a new robotics textbook titled `Principles of Robot Motion' published by MIT Press. She is currently a a member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, an associate editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and for the Computer Science Review. Kavraki is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award for her technical contributions. She has also received an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, the Early Academic Career Award from the IEEE Society on Robotics and Automation, a recognition as a top young investigator from the MIT Technology Review Magazine, and the Duncan Award for excellence in research and teaching from Rice University. Kavraki is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and a Fellow of the World Technology Network. More information on Kavraki's work can be found in: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kavraki. Current projects at her laboratory are described in http://www.kavrakilab.org