Nadia Figueroa is the Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member and Faculty Advisor of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) lab. Before joining the faculty, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), advised by Prof. Julie A. Shah. She completed a Ph.D. (2019) in Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), advised by Prof. Aude Billard. Prior to this, she was a Research Assistant (2012-2013) at the Engineering Department of New York University Abu Dhabi (NYU-AD) and in the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics (2011-2012) at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). She holds a B.Sc. degree in Mechatronics (2007) from Monterrey Tech (ITESM-Mexico) and an M.Sc. degree in Automation and Robotics (2012) from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany.

Her Ph.D. thesis was a finalist for the Georges Giralt Ph.D. award in 2020 - the best European Ph.D. thesis in robotics. She was a finalist for the KUKA Innovation Award in 2017 and the winner of the Best Student Paper Award (as well as a finalist for Best Conference Paper and Best Systems Paper) at the prestigious Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Conference in 2016. She is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) Journal and Co-Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committee on Collaborative Automation for Flexible Manufacturing (CAFM).

Her main research interest focuses on developing human-aware robotic systems: robots that can safely and efficiently interact with humans and the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit. This involves research at the intersection of machine learning, control theory, artificial intelligence, perception, and psychology - with a physical human-robot interaction perspective.