Katherine J. Kuchenbecker received the PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in California, USA, in 2006. After a postdoctoral research fellowship at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, when she also received a secondary appointment in the Penn Department of Computer and Information Science. Since 2017 she has been Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart.