Flight Lieutenant Dr. Kate Yaxley is an Adjunct Lecturer and Visiting Fellow in the School of Systems & Computing at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. As a 20-year veteran of the Royal Australian Air Force, she serves as a Squadron Leader and Electronics Engineering Officer specializing in electronic warfare. Her military career began as an Avionics Technician, leading to her commissioning as an officer in 2007. Subsequent postings included the Joint Electronic Warfare Operational Support Unit and No. 88 Squadron, involving operational deployments in Australia and overseas. Currently, she holds the Sir Richard Williams Scholarship at the Air and Space Power Centre.

Yaxley earned her Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from UNSW Canberra in 2011, Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the United States Air Force Institute of Technology in 2015, and PhD in autonomous systems and artificial intelligence in 2020. Her research interests encompass human-swarm teaming, smart autonomous systems, human-autonomy teaming, cybersecurity education, and UAV applications in agriculture. She led the Sky Shepherding study, revealing that appropriately configured drones induce lower stress in sheep during herding compared to traditional methods, published as "Drone approach parameters leading to lower stress sheep flocking and movement: Sky Shepherding" in Scientific Reports (2021). Other significant works include "Human-Swarm-Teaming Transparency and Trust Architecture" in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica (2020), "Building a Sky Shepherd for the future of agriculture" in Smart Agricultural Technology (2022), "Life-learning of smart autonomous systems for meaningful human-autonomy teaming" (2020 book chapter), and "Biologically Inspired Effectiveness Measures for Shepherding-based Swarm-Guidance Systems" in Adaptive Behavior (2025). Yaxley regularly lectures and mentors students at UNSW Canberra, contributing to AI and autonomous systems methodologies for defence. She was a finalist in the 2021 Women in AI Awards for Australia and New Zealand.

Professional Email: k.yaxley@unsw.edu.au