Barbara Grosz wins graduate mentoring award

Barbara Grosz, Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate Student Council.

The award, presented to five individuals this year, honors faculty advisors who have gone above and beyond in guiding students along their path to the Ph.D. Students nominate their advisors for the award, which is named in honor of Everett I. Mendelsohn, Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, and a former master of Dudley House.

The award celebrates the essential nature of strong mentoring at the graduate level and highlights the crucial role Grosz and her fellow awardees play in fostering caring and intellectually exciting departmental communities.

A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, Grosz seeks to address fundamental problems in modeling collaborative activity, developing systems ("agents") able to collaborate with each other and their users, and constructing collaborative, multi-modal systems for human-computer communication.

She has also played an important role as a mentor to women in science and engineering, serving on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Women in Academic Science and Engineering and on the Association for Computing Machinery Women’s Council Executive Board.

Grosz’ past doctoral students include Martha Pollack, President of Cornell University; Ehud Reiter, Chair in Computing Science at the School of Natural and Computing Sciences, University of Aberdeen; Luke Hunsberger, Professor of Computer Science at Vassar College; and Cécile Balkanski, Associate Professor at IUT d’Orsay, Université Paris-Sud.