Kavraki received her B.A. from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1995. Her research interests are in robotics, and geometric computing, physical algorithms, bioinformatics and structural computational biology. A unifying theme in her work is the investigation of algorithms and system architectures for solving complex geometric problems arising in the physical world. She is the editor of one book and the author of more than seventy refereed publications. Kavraki has received the NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Association for Computing Machinery Grace Murray Hopper Award for her work on probabilistic planning, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, and was selected as one of world's top 100 young innovators by the MIT Technology Review magazine in 2002.