The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to share that former council member Maja Matarić received the 2024-2025 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Athena Lecturer Award. 

Matarić, who also serves as a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, is renowned for her trailblazing contributions to the field of socially assistive robotics. Her groundbreaking research, extensive evaluation, and successful technology transfer initiatives have significantly advanced the field. Additionally, she has laid foundational groundwork in multi-robot coordination and human-robot interaction. 

Initiated in 2006, the award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Aside from innovative research, Matarić has been a strong mentor and advocate for underrepresented groups. 

In fact, she has mentored early career women during her time at the Computing Research Association – Widening Participation (CRA-WP), placing large numbers of women and members of other underrepresented groups in graduate programs and faculty positions. As a CCC council member, Matarić has participated in various workshops including Interacting with Computers All Around Us and Accessible Technology for All and co-authored two whitepapers such as Next Generation Robotics and Advances in Artificial Intelligence Require Progress Across all of Computer Science. 

Matarić said receiving the award is very special to her. She is honored to become part of the amazing group of women who received the award. 

“It offers a tremendous sense of gratification for being able to look back on my career so far and its many non-obvious choices of research topics,” she said. “It gives me such joy to think of the wonderful students and collaborators I have worked with over the years on those topics (well before they became more broadly accepted), and finally it is touching that Athena was my oldest daughter’s favorite character from Greek mythology, and that same daughter will join me as my guest at the award ceremony in June.  I can’t stop smiling!”

Read more about her work in the ACM news release.