Kavraki elected IEEE fellow

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to Rice News

LYDIA KAVRAKI

Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and professor of bioengineering, has been named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

The IEEE has more than 385,000 members in 160 countries. Fellow designation is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as an important career achievement.

Kavraki has published more than 140 papers on such topics as robotics and computer science, computational biology, bioinformatics and metabolic network analysis, and co-authored Principles of Robot Motion, published in 2005 by MIT Press.

Kavraki serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research, the Springer-Verlag Advanced Robotics Series, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Computer Science Review.

She is a fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and World Technology Network. She has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award and a Sloan Fellowship. Kavraki won the Duncan Award for excellence in research and teaching at Rice in 2004.

A native of Greece, Kavraki earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Crete and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, also in computer science, in 1995.

— Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.