Lydia Kavraki
Noah Harding Chair, Professor of Computer Science
Director, The Ken Kennedy Institute
Rice University
Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Chair and professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Bioengineering. She is the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. 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. She was a research associate at Stanford University before moving to Rice.
Kavraki works broadly in robotics, computational biomedicine, and physical AI. She has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and is one of the authors of the widely used robotics textbook “Principles of Robot Motion” published by MIT Press. Work in her group has produced the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL), an open-source library of motion planning algorithms used worldwide. Besides this library her group maintains several web servers for computational biomedicine applications. Kavraki’s research has been funded by NSF, NIH, ARO, DOD, NASA, industry, and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). Kavraki's more than 40 postdocs and PhD students have gone on to faculty positions at top universities, industry research labs, startups, and large software companies. Through her role at the Ken Kennedy Institute, she brings faculty together across seven schools and twenty-seven departments to shape large research projects and future directions in AI, data, and computing at Rice University.
Kavraki is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), Academia Europaea, and the Academy of Athens. She has served the Academies in multiple roles, including serving as a vice-chair and chair of Section 1 of NAM, founding member of the Health and Technology Interest Group of NAM, and member of the Board of Mathematical Sciences and Analytics.
Kavraki received the IEEE Frances E. Allen medal in 2023. She received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award (2000), the ACM Athena Lecturer Award (2017), and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award (2020). Kavraki received the Early Academic Career Award from the IEEE Society on Robotics and Automation (2002) and Robotics Pioneer Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2020). Other awards include an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, a Whitaker Investigator Award, recognition as a top TR100 investigator from the MIT Technology Review Magazine, recognition as a Brilliant 10 Scientist from the Popular Science Magazine, and the Anita Borg ABIE Technical Leadership Award. At Rice University, she is the recipient of the Charles Duncan Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching, the Presidential Mentorship Award, the Outstanding Faculty Research Award from the Engineering School, and the university-wide Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service (2022). She has been recognized in Houston with BioHouston’s Women in Science Award. Kavraki is a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
More information about Kavraki's research can be found at the Kavraki Lab website.