Lydia E. Kavraki Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering Rice University Professor, Graduate Program in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics Baylor College of Medicine

Short Biographical Sketch

Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering at Rice University. She also holds an 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 contributions are in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics (robot motion planning, hybrid systems, formal methods in robotics, assembly planning, micromanipulation, and flexible object manipulation), as well as in computational structural biology, translational bioinformatics, and biomedical informatics (modeling of proteins and biomolecular interactions, large-scale functional annotation of proteins, computer-assisted drug design, and systems biology). Kavraki has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and is one of the authors of a robotics textbook titled "Principles of Robot Motion" published by MIT Press. She is heavily involved in the development of The Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL), which is used in industry and in academic research in robotics and bioinformatics. Kavraki is currently on the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research, the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the Computer Science Review, and Big Data. She is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics. 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 of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Fellow of the World Technology Network (WTN). Kavraki was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies in 2012. She is also a member of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST) since 2012. Current projects at Kavraki's laboratory are described under http://www.kavrakilab.org and http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kavraki.

Short Summary of Research Activities (as of 2011)