Maja Pantic

Maja Pantić, a trailblazing AI researcher and Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London, where she’s pioneering ways for machines to better understand human emotions and behavior.

Originally from Serbia, Pantić earned her BSc, MSc, and PhD in computer science at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, specializing in facial expression analysis.

She has held academic positions at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Twente, and Imperial College London, where she led groundbreaking work on the Zeno robot, designed to support children with autism.

As Research Director at Samsung Electronics’s AI Centre in Cambridge, she advanced multimodal learning and human-computer interaction. Later, she joined Meta as AI Scientific Research Lead, spearheading research on facial expressions, emotion, and social signals—helping power tools used by over a billion people on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

With over 400 research papers and more than 50,000 citations, her work has had far-reaching impact across domains, from healthcare to autonomous vehicles.

Pantić is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and her many accolades include the BCS Roger Needham Award and a Dutch Research Council Junior Fellowship.

Her work continues to inspire a more human-aware future for AI, and the next generation of researchers building it. 🤗