Bajcsy Awarded Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering

Andrea Bajcsy, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science, has received a 2026 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. The fellowship, awarded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, provides early career researchers with $985,834 in unrestricted funding over five years to pursue innovative research.

Bajcsy, one of 20 researchers selected for this year's fellowship, works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning and AI safety. Her research in the university's Robotics Institute focuses on developing safer, more reliable robots that can understand and respond to the complexities around them.

As AI-powered robots become increasingly capable of acting in the physical world, their reliable deployment will require a richer, context-aware understanding of safety that accounts for everything from semantic meaning and hard-to-model physics to security and privacy risks. Bajcsy's research is built on a central hypothesis: that nuanced robot safety behaviors can only emerge from equally nuanced representations of the world. Her group will advance the scientific foundations of AI safety for embodied systems, developing new models and algorithms for robots that act in the real world. Ultimately, she aims to enable robots to make decisions with human-like nuance, while allowing their behavior to be shaped by a broad range of stakeholders, including engineers, policymakers and everyday users.

For more information, visit the Packard Fellowship website.