25 Women in Robotics you need to know about 2013

25 Women in Robotics you need to know about 2013

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, we’ve compiled a short list of some women in robotics that everyone should know about. There are so many many more that we’re already looking forward to featuring them next year. But first, simply creating this post has reopened many arguments about gender and technology and whether we even need to say that there are women who are brilliant at engineering.

From Hypatia to Grace Hopper, there have been amazing women who have fought against massive prejudice to carve themselves out a name in the fields of science, engineering, mathematics and technology. These comparatively few women however can easily be lost from the pages of history and to create a more equal ongoing presence of women in technology, we need to show strong female role models.

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer and in spite of her undoubted mathematical brilliance, she was reluctant to publish herself and made do with publishing ‘commentaries’ on the works of others. Her commentaries were far longer and more original than the originals and in the process she demonstrated the future applications for the universal computing machine that Charles Babbage proposed but never built.

Now in its fourth year, Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women in science, technology, engineering and math who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.

Professionally, the women on our list are all field leaders with a huge impact on robotics, regardless of their gender. So if you need women for your board of directors, or conference panel etc. then you may need to look deeper, because these women are already super busy. But while there are an increasing number of women in robotics, there is nothing like equal representation so – here are 25 reasons why that should change. Please share.

Many thanks to Robohub contributors for all their great suggestions!

25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order)

Sarah Bergbreiter

Sarah Bergbreiter

Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering| Director of the Micro Robotics Lab ... Professor in Mechanical Engineering and PI Microrobotics Lab

University of Maryland ...Carnegie Mellon University ( 2018- present)

US/MD

Aude Billard

Aude Billard

Full Professor | Director of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory

EPFL École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

EU/CH

Cynthia Breazeal

Cynthia Breazeal

Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences | Director of the Personal Robots Group .... Professor of Media Arts and Sciences | Director of the Personal Robots Group | Founder & Chief Scientist

The MIT Media Lab | Jibo

US/MA

Elizabeth Croft

Elizabeth Croft

Professor | Director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory....Dean, Faculty of Engineering

University of British Columbia ... Monash University

AU

Missy Cummings

Missy Cummings

Professor prev Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems |Director, Humans and Automation Laboratory

Duke University

US/MA

Kerstin Dautenhahn

Kerstin Dautenhahn

Professor Computer Science | Director Adaptive Systems Research Group.... Professor and Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics

University of Hertfordshire ...University of Waterloo and University of Hertfordshire

UK

Helen Greiner

Helen Greiner

CEO | Cofounder of iRobot | Founder

Tertill | iRobot | Cyphy Works

US/MA

Heather Knight

Heather Knight

Doctoral research | Marilyn Monrobot ... Assistant Professor

Oregon State University

US/CA

Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi

Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi

Assistant Professor at Nitobe School,

Nitobe School Hokkaida University

JP

Maja Mataric

Maja Mataric

Professor and Chan Soon-Shiong Chair in Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics | Director, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) | Director of the Interaction Lab ... Founder of Embodied Inc

University of Southern California ....Embodied, Inc.

US/CA

Arianna Menciassi

Arianna Menciassi

Associate Professor of biomedical robotics ... Professor

Scuola Superiore Sant�۪Anna

EU/IT

Robin Murphy

Robin Murphy

Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering | Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue

Texas A&M University

US/TX

Radhika Nagpal

Radhika Nagpal

Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science

Wyss Institute - Harvard Harvard | Root Robotics

US/MA

Allison Okamura

Allison Okamura

Associate Professor | Director of the CHARM Lab ... Professor

Stanford University

US/CA

Jamie Paik

Jamie Paik

Professor at EPFL, Director and Founder of Reconfigurable Robotics Lab

EPFL

EU/CH

Lynne Parker

Lynne Parker

Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |Director Distributed Intelligence Laboratory .... Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States

The University of Tennessee-Knoxville....White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

US/DC

Daniela Rus

Daniela Rus

Director of CSAIL | Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Director of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory ...Deputy Dean of Research, Schwarzman College of Computing

MIT

US/MA

Angela Schoellig

Angela Schoellig

Professor

University of Toronto, UTIAS (Dynamic System Lab)

CA

Leila Takayama

Leila Takayama

Senior Researcher Researcher at Hoku Labs and Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz

Google X ... UC Santa Cruz | Hoku labs

US/CA

Andrea Thomaz

Andrea Thomaz

Associate Professor of Interactive Computing | Driector of the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab .... Cofounder of Diligent Robotics | Associate Professor at University of Texas Austin

Georgia Tech ..DIligent Robotics | University of Texas Austin

US/GA

Manuela Veloso

Manuela Veloso

Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science

Carnegie Mellon University

US/PA

Amy Villeneuve

Amy Villeneuve

President and COO

Kiva Systems

US/MA

Astrid Weiss

Astrid Weiss

Postdoctoral research fellow at ACIN Institute of Automation and Control at Vienna University of Technology (Austria)

EU/AT

Mary-Anne Williams

Mary-Anne Williams

Associate Dean Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology | Director, Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab

UTS

AU

Melonee Wise

Melonee Wise

CEO of Fetch Robotics

Fetch Robotics

US/CA