• Noah Harding Chair, Professor of Computer Science
  • Professor of Mechanical Engineering
  • Professor of Bioengineering Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Director, The Ken Kennedy Institute

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.