Patricia A. Vargas

Patricia Vargas is the Founder Director of the Robotics Laboratory and Associate Professor/Reader in Computer Science and Robotics at Heriot–Watt University in Edinburgh. She is an executive associate of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. 

Originally from Brazil, she is currently working on a project that uses Neurorobotics to model Parkinson’s Disease. Her research interests include Evolutionary and Bio-inspired Robotics, Swarm Robotics, Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Human–Robot Interaction, Rehabilitation Robotics and Neurorobotics. 

Dr Vargas was the leading editor of an MIT Press Book entitled “The Horizons of Evolutionary Robotics”, which was on the list of November 2014’s Best Sellers in Engineering and Technology. She has many academic publications. She was one of the 2016 list '25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About' published in Robohub to mark Ada Lovelace Day

She also has a growing record of public appearances talking about robots, appearing live in the BBC Intelligent Machines week in 2015. She was also a speaker in the 2018 New Scientist Live, on Should Robots Have Rights?  and alongaide Ruth Aylett she appeared in the Scottish press in 2015.

Patricia' s latest book, co-authored with Ruth Aylett, THE TROUBLE WITH ROBOTS, explores the threat, or lack therof, of robotics to our status quo and  will be published in 2021 in the UK and the US. 

Visit Patricia's website