Ruzena Bajcsy is the NEC Distinguished Professor Emerita of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her M.S. in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in Bratislava in 1957, Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the same institution in 1967, and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1972. From 1972 to 2001, she served as a professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she founded the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory in 1978. This lab fostered interdisciplinary research involving computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, psychology, and cognitive science. Her early work focused on robotics, including computer vision, tactile perception, system identification, and medical imaging. With her students, she developed a digital anatomy atlas using elastic matching algorithms, enabling automatic identification of brain structures in X-ray tomography, MRI, and positron emission tomography; this technology is now standard in medical practice. Bajcsy also headed the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation from 1999 to 2001.

In 2001, Bajcsy joined UC Berkeley as the NEC Distinguished Professor and served as the founding director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) from 2001 to 2005, a multicampus initiative spanning UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Merced. Through CITRIS, she co-established a Digital Humanities program with the University of California Center for the Humanities. Her research interests encompass artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, human-computer interaction, biosystems and computational biology, control and intelligent systems, graphics, and security. Current efforts involve robotic technologies to noninvasively measure kinematic and dynamic parameters of human movement, assessing capabilities or limitations and designing assistive devices. Bajcsy has received numerous honors, including the National Academy of Engineering membership (1997), National Academy of Medicine membership (1995), IEEE Fellow (1992), ACM Fellow (1996), Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2009), IEEE Robotics and Automation Award (2013), IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology (2021), and Berkeley Citation (2023). Key publications include the edited book Confluence of Computer Vision and Computer Graphics (2000), Digital Anatomy Atlas and Its Registration to MRI, fMRI, PET: The Past Presents a Future (2003), and High-Quality Visualization for Geographically Distributed 3-D Teleimmersive Applications (2011). Her work has profoundly influenced robotics, computer vision, and interdisciplinary applications in computer science.

Professional Email: bajcsy@eecs.berkeley.edu