She obtained her PhD at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, where she was a member of the Personal Robotics Lab. She was born in Romania and received her B.Sc. in Computer Science from Jacobs University in Germany in 2009. Her research lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and human-robot interaction: she works on algorithms that enable robots to seamlessly work with, around, and in support of people. She's received awards from Siebel, Dan David, Intel, and Google, and her publications have been best paper finalists at Robotics: Science and Systems, the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and the International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. Julie A. Shah