Lydia E. Kavraki is the Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, as well as, a multidisciplinary professor, her teachings span from Bioengineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering to Mechanical Engineering at Rice University. Kavraki received her B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research interests are robotics, AI, and biomedicine; she has developed algorithms for motion planning and machine learning, in computational biomedicine she has inspired methods for understanding biomolecular interactions and for medicinal drug discovery.