Elizabeth Mamantov Selected for Microsoft Graduate Women’s Scholarship

CSE graduate student Elizabeth Mamantov has been selected as a 2014 Microsoft Graduate Women’s Scholar. This year, Microsoft has awarded only 10 such scholarships to top Ph.D. students in the US and Canada who represent a selection of the best and the brightest in their fields.

Elizabeth’s research interests are in embodied cognition, robotics, and cognitive architecture, and she is currently working with John Laird, the John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering, in the Soar Research Group. The goal of her research is to equip robots with the cognitive skills they need to handle real-world environments in an intelligent, human-like fashion.

Elizabeth came to Michigan in Fall 2013, after earning her BA in Computer Science at Bowdoin College, where her honors thesis was “Cognitive visuo-spatial reasoning for robotic soccer agents.” While at Bowdoin, she was a member of Bowdoin’s RoboCup soccer team from fall 2010 to summer 2013 and served as code boss in the 2012-2013 competition cycle.