Two women on the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas, have been honored with awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and a professor of bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute, has won the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal “for foundational probabilistic algorithms and randomized search methods that have broad impact in robotic motion planning and computational biology.”
Professor Kavraki joined the Rice University faculty in 1996. Dr. Kavraki received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Crete in Greece. She earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University
Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, a professor of bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Rice 360: Institute for Global Health Technology, won the IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology “for contributions to optical solutions for cancer detection and leadership in establishing the field of global health engineering.”
Dr. Richards-Kortum is the author of Biomedical Engineering for Global Health (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Professor Richards-Kortum is a graduate of the University of Nebraska, where she majored in physics and mathematics. She holds a master’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in medical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.