Lydia Kavraki

Lydia Kavraki is Professor at Rice University with joint appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and serves as Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute. Her pioneering work bridges robotics, artificial intelligence, and computational biomedicine to develop human-centered robotic systems and biomedical computational tools.

Her academic foundation includes:

• B.A. in Computer Science from University of Crete, Greece
• Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University

Research Interests:
Kavraki develops motion planning algorithms for high-dimensional robotic systems, frameworks for uncertainty reasoning in human-robot collaboration, and computational methods for protein modeling and drug discovery. Her lab's work enables applications from home assistive robots to space habitat construction and has produced widely adopted tools including OMPL for motion planning and HLA-Arena for immunotherapy research. Current focus areas include personalized medicine through computational biomedicine and advancing AI for dynamic robotic environments.

Scientific Recognition:

• 2020 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award & IEEE Robotics Pioneer Award
• Member of US National Academy of Medicine (2012) and International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (2020)
• Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, AAAI, AIMBE, and Sloan Foundation
• 2017 ACM Athena Lecturer Award for advancing women in computing
• 2000 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for foundational motion planning research

She directs Rice's National Library of Medicine Biomedical Informatics Training Program and has mentored generations through Keck Center consortia, earning Rice's Presidential Mentorship Award (2016). Her OMPL library is industry-standard in robotics with ROS/MoveIt integration.

Kavraki leads a multidisciplinary lab producing open-source tools including DINC/APE-Gen for molecular docking and LabelHash for protein analysis, driving convergence between robotics, AI, and biomedical sciences through NSF/NIH-funded initiatives.