Short Bio
Georgia Chalvatzaki is a Full Professor of Interactive Robot Perception and Learning at TU Darmstadt, Germany, where she leads the PEARL Lab. Her research focuses on robot learning, combining structured representations, geometric and physical inductive biases, and learning from interaction to enable robots to acquire generalizable manipulation skills. She is a recipient of an ERC Starting Grant (2024), the Alfried Krupp Sponsorship Prize (2025), and a DFG Emmy Noether Grant (2021). She currently serves as Program Chair of CoRL 2026 and Vice President of the German Robotics Society (DGR).
Full Biography
Georgia Chalvatzaki is a Full Professor of Interactive Robot Perception and Learning at the Department of Computer Science of Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and a member of hessian.AI, the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence. She leads the PEARL Lab (Interactive Robot Perception and Learning), where her research focuses on developing intelligent robotic systems that can perceive, reason, learn, and act autonomously in complex physical environments.
Her research lies at the intersection of robot learning, embodied artificial intelligence, and robotic manipulation, with a particular emphasis on structured robot learning. Her work investigates how geometric, physical, and compositional structures can be incorporated into learning systems to improve generalization, efficiency, and robustness. By combining advances in machine learning with insights from classical robotics, her group develops methods for learning complex manipulation skills, integrating perception and action, and enabling robots to adapt through physical interaction with their environment. A central ambition of her research is to advance robotic systems beyond narrowly trained behaviors toward generalizable and adaptive embodied intelligence, capable of operating safely and effectively alongside humans.
Georgia’s research has received several major distinctions. In 2024, she was awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for her project SIREN, investigating structured learning for intelligent robotic systems. In 2025, she received the Alfried Krupp Sponsorship Prize, one of Germany’s most prestigious scientific awards for early-career professors in the natural and engineering sciences. Previously, in 2021, she was awarded a DFG Emmy Noether Grant for her project iROSA, through which she established her independent research group at TU Darmstadt. She was also selected as an ELLIS Scholar in 2024.
Georgia studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, where she completed her doctoral research at the Intelligent Robotics and Automation Laboratory. Her Ph.D. research focused on human-centered modeling, stochastic estimation, and robot learning for assistive robotics. She subsequently joined the Intelligent Autonomous Systems group at TU Darmstadt as a postdoctoral researcher in 2019. In March 2021, she established her independent DFG-funded research group, was appointed Assistant Professor in 2022, and became a Full Professor (W3) in April 2023.
Her scientific contributions have been recognized through several research and service awards, including the IROS 2022 Best Paper Award in Mobile Manipulation, Best Paper Awards at workshops of ICRA 2023 and RSS 2024, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Outstanding Associate Editor Award (2023), and recognition as a NeurIPS Top Reviewer (2023). Earlier distinctions include the Daimler and Benz Foundation Scholarship (2022), the German Informatics Society’s AI Newcomer Award (2021), and selection as an RSS Pioneer (2020). She has been invited to deliver numerous keynote and plenary talks at international scientific conferences, workshops, and research institutions, including the Early Career Keynote at CoRL 2024.
Beyond her research, Georgia is actively involved in shaping the international robotics community. She serves as Vice President of the German Robotics Society (DGR) and as a Program Chair of the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2026). She is also a co-chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Mobile Manipulation. From 2024 to 2026, she chaired the IEEE RAS Women in Engineering Committee, supporting initiatives to foster inclusion, mentorship, and opportunities for the next generation of robotics researchers. She also served as Program Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2026).
Through her research, mentoring, and community leadership, Georgia works toward advancing robot learning as a scientific discipline and developing intelligent robotic systems that can meaningfully interact with and assist people in the physical world.
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