MassRobotics announced its 2025 Robotics Medal winners, honoring women researchers in robotics with a $50K prize.
MassRobotics, a robotics innovation organization, announced its 2025 Robotics Medal and Rising Star recipients at the IEEE ICRA conference in Atlanta. The Robotics Medal is an award recognizing female researchers contributing to robotics development internationally. It is given to a nominated woman researcher for her contributions to the field and includes a $50K prize. The Rising Star Medal recognizes emerging women researchers contributing to robotics and includes a $5K award.
The 3rd Annual MassRobotics Robotics Medal, sponsored by Amazon Robotics, is presented to Dr. Maja Matarić, Chaired and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California,for her work in socially assistive robots and contributions to distributed robots and learning in human-robot systems.
Dr. Tania Morimoto, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, has received the MassRobotics Rising Star Medal in Robotics for her work on soft and flexible medical robots and human-machine interfaces aimed at improving access to medical care.
To support broader participation in robotics, Amazon established an endowment with MassRobotics in 2022 to fund these annual awards. The Robotics Medal recognizes individual contributions and aims to support the involvement of women and other underrepresented groups in the development of robotics.
“As the founding sponsor of the Robotics Medal, we aim to recognize and honor female robotics professors around the globe who have made remarkable contributions to advancing robotics technology,” explained Tye Brady, who serves as both the chief technologist at Amazon Robotics and chairperson of MassRobotics’ board. “We are deeply grateful for the invaluable insights and educational contributions provided by both Dr. Matarić and Dr. Morimoto to our physical AI community and we’re proud to support this recognition in honor of their achievements.”
Since 2017, MassRobotics has expanded from a Massachusetts-based incubator to an organization with international reach, supporting robotics adoption in various regions and offering resources to assist startup development. Of the 95+ startups currently based at its Boston facility, over 50% are from outside Massachusetts and 25% are from outside the United States.
MassRobotics hosts STEM and robotics initiatives designed for high school women and supports women in robotics through events and networking opportunities. Over the past five years, the MassRobotics Jumpstart Fellowship program has graduated nearly 100 students who have enrolled at universities such as MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, Boston University, Stanford, Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, Purdue University, and the University of Massachusetts.
According to the National Girls Collaborative Project, women make up 48 % of the total workforce, 34% of the STEM workforce, and 16% of those in engineering and robotics roles.
Nominations were submitted from around the United States including Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as from countries such as Canada, Japan, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, and India. Submissions covered various robotics-related fields and research areas, including new gripping materials, exoskeletons, assistive technologies, human-robot interaction, and motion planning.
The Robotics Medal and Rising Star recipients were selected by a committee of robotics professionals, led by MassRobotics, which met to review and assess the technical contributions of each nominee, considering their impact and novelty in the field of robotics.
Edited by Puja Mitra, WTWH Media, for Control Engineering, from a MassRobotics news release.
