Lydia E. Kavraki
Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, professor of Bioengineering, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rice University. She is the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University.
Her research interests span robotics, AI, and biomedicine. In robotics and AI, she is interested in enabling robots to work with people and in support of people. Kavraki’s lab is inspired by a variety of applications: from robots that will assist people in their homes, to robots that would build space habitats. In biomedicine she develops computational methods and tools to model protein structure and function, understand biomolecular interactions, aid the process of medicinal drug discovery, analyze the molecular machinery of the cell, and help integrate biological and biomedical data for improving human health. Her work has applications, among others, in personalized immunotherapy and in the design of novel therapeutics for asthma. Through the confluence of algorithms, statistical reasoning, formal methods, machine learning, data science and, importantly, physics modeling, Kavraki and her associates seek to understand how computers can reason effectively and robustly about problems in the real world.
Kavraki has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and is one of the authors of the widely-used robotics textbook titled Principles of Robot Motion. She currently serves as an associate editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research, the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the Computer Science Review, the Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, and the Annual Reviews for Robotics, Control, and Autonomous Systems.
She has received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award, ACM Athena Lecturer Award and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award. Kavraki has also received the Robotics Pioneer Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
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 Professor Jean-Claude Latombe.