About UChicago Argonne, LLC
Board of Governors
Ruzena Bajcsy, Ph.D.
- Member, UChicago Argonne, LLC Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory
- Professor and Director for IT Research in the Interest of Science, University of California, Berkeley
Ruzena Bajcsy believes in fostering cutting-edge technology to improve people's lives. With this in mind, she became director in 2001 of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), an initiative bringing together the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz with private industry to develop ways to use information technology to affect people's daily lives. Projects marry important applications, from health care delivery to climate monitoring. At Berkeley, she is a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department.
"I studied biology and psychology because the best machine is the human machine. After all, modern evolution is the best engineer you can imagine," says the world renowned researcher.
Before Berkeley, Bajcsy headed the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. During her tenure there, she helped establish NSF's Information Technology Research program, which funds innovative, high-impact research supporting infrastructure in information technology.
From 1972 to 1999, she was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, starting as an assistant professor in Computer and Information Science. She was named a professor in 1984. She chaired the department of Computer and Information Science from 1985 to 1990, the first woman to hold an academic administrative position at the university's School of Engineering and Applied Science. She did research in robotics, artificial intelligence and machine perception and served as director of the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory (GRASP), a world-renowned research lab she founded in 1978.
Bajcsy's credentials reach across the traditionally discrete fields of neuroscience, applied mechanics and computer science. She is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine.
Born in Slovakia, Bajcsy lost her parents and most of her relatives to Nazi oppression in 1944. Despite being orphaned at 11, she obtained her M.S. (1957) and Ph.D. (1967) degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University and a Ph.D. (1972) in computer science from Stanford. A fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, she has numerous writings and presentations and has served on many editorial boards and committees. She was named to Argonne 's Board of Governors in 2003.
