Amy LaViers is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab where she develops robotic algorithms inspired by movement and dance theory. She is the recipient of a 2015 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA). She has worked in the area of advanced manufacturing, through an industry-university consortium, the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM), defense, and healthcare, and forged interdisciplinary ties with the UVA and UIUC Dance Programs and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies, where she completed a Certification in Movement Analysis (CMA) in 2016. Prior to UIUC she held a position as an assistant professor for two years in systems and information engineering at the University of Virginia. She completed her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech where she was the recipient of the ECE Graduate Teaching Excellence Award and a finalist for the CETL/BP Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award. Her dissertation included a live performance exploring the concepts of style she developed there. Her research began at Princeton University where she earned a certificate in dance and a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Her senior thesis, which quantitatively compared two styles of dance, earned top honors in the MAE department, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Lewis Center for the Arts.
