Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dr. Gorlatova's research goal is to advance computing systems that operate reliably in complex open-world environments and in close interaction with people, drawing on an in-depth understanding of human perception, attention, needs, and behavior. Her current focus is on safe and robust augmented reality (AR) and human-centered spatial AI.
Dr. Gorlatova earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Ottawa, Canada. She has several years of industry experience, where she had been affiliated with Telcordia Technologies, IBM, and D. E. Shaw Research. She came to Duke from Princeton University, where she held the positions of an Associate Research Scholar in the Electrical Engineering Department and an Associate Director of the Princeton EDGE Lab.
Dr. Gorlatova received multiple awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
Contact Information
- Email Address: maria.gorlatova@duke.edu
- Websites:
Education
- B.S. University of Ottawa (Canada), 2004
- M.S. University of Ottawa (Canada), 2007
- Ph.D. Columbia University, 2013
- Princeton University, 2018
Research Interests
Dr. Gorlatova's lab works on safe and robust augmented reality (AR), human-centered spatial AI, and the scientific and computer systems foundations of next-generation extended reality (XR) and immersive AI. Specific research directions include robust environmental and user-state awareness, runtime assessment and monitoring, adaptive operation in changing real-world conditions, edge AI, embedded sensing, wireless communications, and real-time system evaluation, as well as applications of spatial AI and XR in healthcare and human-robot collaboration (HRC).
