Shilpa Gulati has been interested in building robot brains to improve human well-being since she was in her teens. She leads the Behavior Prediction team at Waymo that develops algorithms to predict the future actions of other users, such as other vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. This is one of the key technologies comprising an autonomous vehicle’s “brain”. Prior to that, she led a team of engineers in autonomous systems at Apple, and before that, she worked in autonomous driving at Robert Bosch LLC. Earlier in her career, at Stone Aerospace, Shilpa was part of a NASA-funded project to develop a platform for testing technologies for discovery of life on Europa, Jupiter’s moon. There, she wrote navigation algorithms for an autonomous underwater vehicle and spent several weeks testing it in the Antarctic Dry Valleys in 2008 and 2009. Shilpa has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.