Ruzena Bajcsy obtained her first Ph.D. from Slovak University and her second Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Stanford University. She served as the chair of her department at the University of Pennsylvania, where the General Robotic Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory she oversees is internationally recognized. Her research areas concentrate on machine perception, computer vision, characterizing and solving problems involving segmentation, 3-D vision and other sensory modalities that function together with vision. She has served on numerous National Research Council and National Science Foundation advisory boards and committees. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, a founding Fellow of the AAAI, and a member of the National Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering. She has also served on the CRA board for three years. Now she is on leave from the University of Pennsylvania and serves as the Assistant Director.