Chinwe Ekenna is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and the Director of the Robotics, Algorithm and Computable Systems (RACS) Laboratory. Dr. Ekenna participates in publicly engaged activities which encourage young women in STEM. Dr. Ekenna’s research centers on intelligent motion planning applied to robotics and proteins. She has explored intelligent adaptation of robotic motion planning to improve planning time and topological data analysis methods to capture important features of robot planning spaces. This has been applied to protein drug target identification, gene expression prediction and small chemical compound analysis.