Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy ("buy chee") was appointed Director of CITRIS at the University of California, Berkeley on November 1, 2001. Prior to coming to Berkeley, she was Assistant Director of the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) between December 1, 1998 and September 1, 2001. As head of National Science Foundation's CISE directorate, Dr. Bajcsy managed a $500 million annual budget. She came to the NSF from the University of Pennsylvania where she was a professor of computer science and engineering.

Dr. Bajcsy is a pioneering researcher in machine perception, robotics and artificial intelligence. She is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Berkeley. She is also a member of the Neuroscience Institute and the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former Director of the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory, which she founded in 1978.

Dr. Bajcsy has done seminal research in the areas of human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, computerized radiological/medical image processing and artificial vision. She is highly regarded, not only for her significant research contributions, but also for her leadership in the creation of a world-class robotics laboratory, recognized world wide as a premiere research center. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the Institute of Medicine. She is especially known for her wide-ranging, broad outlook in the field and her cross-disciplinary talent and leadership in successfully bridging such diverse areas as robotics and artificial intelligence, engineering and cognitive science.

Dr. Bajcsy received her Master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, respectively. She received a Ph.D. in computer science in 1972 from Stanford University, and since that time has been teaching and doing research at Penn's Department of Computer and Information Science. She began as an assistant professor and within 13 years became chair of the department. Prior to her work at the University of Pennsylvania, she taught during the 1950s and 1960s as an instructor and assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science at Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. She has served as advisor to more than 50 Ph.D. recipients. In 2001 she received an honorary doctorate from Universty of Ljubljana in Slovenia

In 2001 she became a recipient of the ACM A. Newell award. In the November 2002 issue of Discover she was named to its list of the 50 most important women in science. In April of 2003 she received the CRA Distinguished Service Award and in May 2003 she was nominated to become a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

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