Professor from Crete wins 2016 Presidential Award for Mentoring

The award is given to a Rice University faculty member who demonstrates strong commitment to mentoring graduate or undergraduate students.

Lydia E. Kavraki (Greek: Λυδία Καβράκη) is a Greek computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering at Rice University, and a professor of structural and computational biology and molecular biophysics at Baylor College of Medicine. She is known for her work on motion planning and bioinformatics and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.

Kavraki did her undergraduate studies at the University of Crete. She then moved to Stanford University for her graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of Jean-Claude Latombe. She joined the Rice faculty in 2004.

Awards and honors
In 2000, Kavraki won the Grace Murray Hopper Award for her work on probabilistic roadmaps. In 2002, Popular Science magazine listed her in their "Brilliant 10" awards,and in the same year Technology Review listed her in their annual list of 35 innovators under the age of 35. In 2010, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to robotic motion planning and its application to computational biology." She is also a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.