Dr. Holly Yanco is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also Co-Director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. For over 25 years, she has assembled and led a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations to solve open problems in robotics and AI. Her research interests include human-robot interaction across a broad range of application domains, evaluation metrics and methods for robot systems, and the use of robots in K-12 education to broaden participation in computer science. Yanco is a member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council and the DARPA ISAT Study Group. She has a PhD and MS in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from Wellesley College. Yanco is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).