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 and how to plan for hybrid robotic
systems. 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 Transactions
on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and for the Computing Surveys.
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