People

Leadership

Lydia

Lydia E. Kavraki, PhD
Director, Ken Kennedy Institute
"my last name"@rice.edu
713-348-5737

Lydia E. Kavraki is the Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute. She is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, professor of Bioengineering, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor of 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 span robotics, AI, and biomedicine. In robotics and AI, she develops algorithms for motion planning, machine learning and data science methods for reasoning under uncertainty, and multi-modal frameworks to instruct robots and collaborate with them. In computational biomedicine, she develops robotics-inspired methods for understanding bimolecular interactions and for medicinal drug discovery. Kavraki is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Athens. She is a recipient of the Presidential Mentorship Award and the Outstanding Faculty Research Award at Rice University, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award.

Angela

Angela Wilkins, PhD
Executive Director, Ken Kennedy Institute
Angela.d.wilkins@rice.edu
713-348-3128

Angela Wilkins is the Executive Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute. Angela is responsible for the development and implementation of Ken Kennedy Institute’s programs in the computational sciences. After earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Lehigh University, she shifted her focus to computational biology and spent nine years at Baylor College of Medicine as a researcher and instructor. She later served as director of clinical research at the nonprofit Center for Science & Law, and in 2017 founded a start-up to help early stage companies solve data science problems. She was previously chief scientist of Mercury Fund, a Houston venture capital group, advising on artificial intelligence-related investments. Wilkins holds four patents, has been involved in several federally funded projects and has been published extensively.