Faculty Profiles

Capsule Bio:

Dr. Laurel Riek is a Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, with a joint appointment in the Department of Emergency Medicine, and is affiliated with the Contextual Robotics Institute and Design Lab. Dr. Riek directs the Healthcare Robotics Lab, and leads research in human-robot interaction (HRI), assistive and accessible technology, embodied AI, and health informatics. Riek’s current research projects have applications in acute care, neuro-rehabilitation, and home health. The lab is very interested in supporting health equity through community health efforts.

Dr. Riek received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, and B.S. in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon. Riek served as a Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer and Roboticist at The MITRE Corporation from 2000-2008, working on learning and vision systems for robots, and held the Clare Boothe Luce chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame from 2011-2016.

Dr. Riek has received the NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, Qualcomm Research Award, and multiple best paper awards. Riek’s research has been supported by the NSF, AFOSR, ONR, DOE, and a number of companies and foundations.

Prof. Riek currently serves as HRI Editor for the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Human Robot Interaction (THRI), and previously served as the HRI 2023 General Co-Chair and HRI 2020 Program Co-Chair.