Chinwe Ekenna

Chinwe Ekenna is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY) and directs the Robotics, Algorithm and Computable Systems (RACS) Laboratory. She serves as a faculty advisor for UAlbany's ACM-W chapter, promoting women in robotics and STEM.

• PhD in Computer Science from Texas A&M University (2016)
• MSc in Computer Science from Covenant University, Nigeria (2008)
• BSc in Computer Science from Covenant University, Nigeria (2006)

Her research focuses on intelligent motion planning for robotics and proteins, integrating machine learning to enhance planning efficiency and accuracy. Key areas include computational biology, robotic navigation, and topological modeling.

Her recent publications explore transformer-based motion planning, attention mechanisms for molecular analysis, and discrete Morse theory for robotics. These works bridge artificial intelligence, robotics, and biomedical applications.

As a leader, she organized the Meet the Women in Robotics Workshop at RSS 2019, funded by the National Science Foundation. Her teaching includes courses in theory of computation and algorithms.

At the RACS Laboratory, her team investigates path planning, adversarial robustness, and robotics in dynamic environments, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.