Dr. Laurel Riek is an Associate 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 teaming, assistive robotics, embodied AI, and health informatics, and builds intelligent systems which work proximately with people. Riek’s current research projects have applications in acute care, neurorehabilitation, and community health, and focus on fostering inclusion and health equity.

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, DOE, and a number of companies and foundations.

Prof. Riek currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Human Robot Interaction (THRI), IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), and is the HRI 2023 General Co-Chair.

Personal Homepage