USC Robotics Leader Maja Matarić Named to Forbes 50 Over 50: Innovation List

USC roboticist and award-winning researcher Maja Matarić has been named to the 2026 Forbes 50 Over 50: Innovation list, recognized for pioneering the field of socially assistive robotics.

Forbes highlights her work designing robots that "can interact with children with autism, elderly people, students with anxiety and stroke survivors."

For more than two decades, Matarić has focused on creating robots that "help people help themselves," using social interaction to provide personalized motivation and support to people facing health and developmental challenges. Her research spans autism spectrum disorders, stroke recovery, dementia, anxiety and child perception of pain.

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a recipient of the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, the ACM Lawler Award for Humanitarian Computing, and the MassRobotics Robotics Medal.

Matarić is the Chan Soon-Shiong Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience and Pediatrics and leads the USC Interaction Lab. She has appointments at USC Viterbi and USC Stevens School of Computing and AI's Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, and Children's Hospital Los Angeles's Department of Pediatrics. She is also the founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center and a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind.

Matarić answers 20 questions about her career, research, inspirations and the ideas that continue to shape her work below.

Where is your hometown?

Belgrade, Serbia (previously Yugoslavia).

Where did you get your undergraduate and graduate degrees?

I earned my bachelor's in computer science from the University of Kansas, and later my master's and PhD in computer science and AI from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

What year did you join USC?

1997.

What's your favorite corner on campus at USC?

The little fountain area between RTH and EEB.

What's your favorite memory at USC during your time here?

There are too many to choose from!

Every year when I put a PhD hood over one of my PhD students, I feel like my heart swells. I get to meet their families and tell them how proud they should be. Now we're all a family, and these students are still my friends.

Bringing my kids to campus, to show them what I do and have them meet my students is always fun as well!

What does innovation mean to you personally?

I like to think of innovation as solving problems, looking at challenges differently and approaching them in a way that hasn't been considered before in order to improve the world.

If you weren't a researcher, what would you be?

If I were to do something entirely different, I'd love to be a philanthropist. In fact, that's why I switched into my field to try to do some hopefully direct good for the world.

Are you a coffee or a tea person?

Iced tea. Iced tea all the way, but definitely not coffee! Can you see me with coffee? That would be too much for humanity.

Where did your interest in robotics first begin?

I've really always been most interested in what makes us as humans tick. Why do we do what we do? Why do we not do things we should be doing? I'm really interested in behavior in the world.

As an undergraduate student, I studied computer science because that was a way to get a job as an immigrant. But I was also really interested in psychology, so I studied both. For me, the place where the two came together was: what drives human behavior in the world?

People behave in the world, animals behave in the world, and then you've got robots. They are artificial intelligence that behaves in the world. Many years ago, before the era of physical AI and cognitive AI, I thought, "I'm interested in AI. I'm interested in intelligence, natural and artificial, but I want to see it in the mode of behavior in the world. I want to see it happening. I don't want it to be just words or numbers." And that's how I got into robotics.

Who has been your biggest mentor throughout your career?

I will never stop saying this: my mom was my ultimate role model.

She was a fierce woman and a poet, and she didn't care what anybody thought. She was completely unique and also very brave. She moved to a new country in her middle age, where she couldn't get a job. Her ability to push through all the crap was, to me, an incredible beacon.

What is socially assistive robotics, for those unfamiliar with the field?

Socially assistive robotics is all about robots helping people socially, not physically. So instead of doing your work for you, it helps and motivates you so that you can do it for yourself.

The idea is that robots help people help themselves, which is different from robotics that focuses on robots doing things for people.

For example, if a stroke survivor's right arm isn't working and they're right-handed, instead of the robot bringing them something, it motivates them to relearn how to reach for an object. It might give them some coaching and feedback and help a little bit, but not all the way. Because if something brings your coffee cup all the time and does the work for you after you've had a stroke, you won't get the practice you need to recover.

I see this as really important because we are physical creatures and need to be doing something. If robots are doing everything for us, I think we're going to lose our rudder and sense of purpose.

What first inspired you to develop robots that interact with and assist people?

I got interested in robotics at the end of college. But the robotics I did had nothing to do with people. It was only after I already had tenure and my first child that I started to think of how I could do robotics in a way that could really have an impact in improving people's lives.

I wanted to be able to say to my child, the only one then but now three, "Mommy's robots help people."

What are the key ingredients of building socially assistive robots?

They really have to be engaging for people. That is the secret sauce. People have to want to interact with them, and there is no quick answer to how to do that. It has to do with everything: What does the robot look like? What can it do? What does it say? How does it move? What is it even designed for? Are people using it the way we intended?

There's so much to understand about humans to create technologies that help them, and we are learning about people while doing so.

Of all your projects, is there one that you're the most proud of?

I cannot do that. That's like saying, "Which student am I most proud of?" I could never do that.

Since we moved into socially assistive technologies, it's just been amazing. How could I say, "the work on autism is more important than the work on stroke, anxiety or child perception of pain"? Of course I can't choose, and I refuse to choose.

I love all of these trajectories we've taken. Some have gone longer than others, but we've learned from every single one.

What do you think makes an idea truly innovative?

I think the best judgment of that has to come with time and its impact on the world.

The truth is, innovation has to have an impact in the world, and that could take time. That's why many innovators don't get to see their impact until they're long gone.

What inspired you to expand beyond academic research and co-found the startup Embodied?

In 2016, after years of work on socially assistive robots, particularly in autism, I wanted to bring it to families that needed it. Research is one kind of impact, and bringing products into the world for people who could use them is another. And that was the motivation for doing it.

What's the biggest challenge you've faced in your life?

I believe in the adage that challenges are opportunities.

I've always been an outsider. Being the only woman in computer science classes as an undergraduate was a pain. Being the only person from a country no one had ever heard of, or having people misjudge me because of whatever stories they've heard about the part of the world I'm from, was also difficult.

But I think being an outsider, once you lean into it fully or push through, can be a superpower. Being different gives me an opportunity to tell people a story that enlightens them.

I'm different, it's entirely my story, and I get to claim it.

What has shifted over time as you've led generations of students in your lab?

The biggest thing that has changed is that when the lab transitioned to human-robot interaction, my students became way more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and even undergraduate majors. That's been incredible because I think it's brought more perspectives, ideas, breadth and depth to the work we do.

I get a pulse on the world through my students. Often, it's a set of crazy ideas that we'll just sit and talk about, but we're driven by what people perceive as a challenge in their lives. It's sometimes hard to predict, and it's often really reflective of what's going on in the world.

Advice for future innovators and students?

My first advice is: look for real problems.

The best innovation is need-inspired research, not just someone thinking, "I have a brilliant idea." How would you know it's a brilliant idea? You have to go into the real world, talk to people and find out what problems and challenges they're experiencing. If you're innovating for a product, you should look at what people actually want, not what you think they want.

That's been a big lesson of human-robot interaction. People have all kinds of misguided notions of what kind of robots people will want, but it depends on who you're talking to, their life experience and their challenges.

The second thing is: don't let people tell you what you can't do.

And the third is that there's amazing power in collaborative work and young people. I've worked with generations of young students who came in knowing very little about the field but went on to accomplish a lot. We've done more than companies have been able to do-just a few smart students making things happen. Why is that? Because we get together as a team to find a need and don't take no for an answer.

What does your next chapter of innovation look like

To me, there are no chapters.

The innovation I do is shaped by the amazing students in my lab. What I was doing 10 years ago was shaped by students then, and what I'm doing now is shaped by students now. These students come in wanting to explore new areas, and together we shape new directions.

The fact that we've worked on anxiety for a decade is a result of this being a very personal journey for many students today. Similarly, we've worked in autism for 25 years, and I've had a lot of students for whom that was a part of their lives through siblings or, in some cases, themselves. So they brought in incredible insight, motivation, drive and commitment to doing research in the area.

One project I'm particularly excited about is an NIH-supported clinical trial to see how these socially assistive robots can help college students learn emotion self-regulation skills.

After the trial, my student was tearing up when she told me that one of the college students had the robot for six weeks and said it changed her life. Testimonials like that make us think "that is why we do what we do." And that is why I will keep doing what I do.

Published on October 1st, 2026

Last updated on October 1st, 2026