IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2019 - 138

WOMEN IN ENGINEERING

Best Practices of Successful
Academic Research Labs
By Chinwe Ekenna and Lydia Tapia

E

ach year, the IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society (RAS)
recognizes individuals for their
outstanding achievements in
scholarship, leadership, and service. In
2019, four of these awards were given
to women. The RAS Women in
Engineering group was honored to
bring together and interview the
award recipients for IEEE Robotics and
Automation Magazine (RAM) during
the 2019 IEEE International Con -
ference on Robotics and Automation.
Specifically, we aimed at learning how
these amazing women led such vibrant
and active labs within an academic
setting where researchers must balance
experimental setups, deployment
periods, and publication deadlines, all
while managing student learning,
numerous meetings, and the often-
required programming and debugg-
ing. The academic labs run by the
women highlighted here are the
driving force behind several successful
inventions and the development of
world-class algorithms. We hope that
this article imparts some of the secrets
of their success.
Nancy M. Amato, winner of the 2019
George Saridis Leadership Award, is the
Abel Bliss Professor and department
head of computer science at the Univer-
sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Before joining the University of Illinois
in January 2019, she was the Regents
Professor and Unocal Professor of Com-
puter Science and Engineering at Texas
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2019.2945741
Date of current version: 11 December 2019

138

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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Nancy M. Amato.

Allison M. Okamura.

A&M University. Her main areas of
research are motion planning and robot-
ics, computational biology and geome-
try, and parallel and distributed
computing. She has graduated 23 Ph.D.
degree students and 28 master's students
and worked with more than 100 under-
graduate and high school researchers,
the majority being students from groups
underrepresented in computing. She is
vice president for Member Activities for
the RAS and served as program chair for
the 2015 IEEE International Conference
on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
and for Robotics: Science and Systems in
2016. She is a fellow of the Association
for the Advancement of Artificial Intelli-
gence, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and Associa-
tion for Computing Machinery, as well
as an IEEE Fellow.
Allison M. Okamura, 2019 Distin-
guished Service Award recipient, is a

professor of mechanical engineering at
Stanford University, California, with a
courtesy appointment in computer sci-
ence. She was previously professor and
vice chair of mechanical engineering at
Johns Hopkins University. She is cur-
rently editor-in-chief of IEEE Robotics
and Automation Letters and has been
an associate editor of IEEE Transactions
on Haptics, editor-in-chief of the ICRA
Conference Editorial Board, an editor
of International Journal of Robotics
Research, and cochair of the IEEE
Haptics Symposium. Her academic
interests include haptics, teleoperation,
virtual environments and simulators,
medical robotics, soft robotics, neuro-
mechanics and rehabilitation, pros-
thetics, and education.
Jeannette Bohg, 2019 Early Aca-
demic Career Award recipient, is an
assistant professor for robotics in the
Stanford University computer science

DECEMBER 2019
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2019

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