Dr Patricia A. Vargas is the Founder Director of the Robotics Laboratory and Associate Professor/Reader in Computer Science and Robotics at the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot–Watt University (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK). She is an executive associate of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. She is also member of the Higher Education Academy, IEEE Robotics and Automation, and Computational Intelligence Societies plus an exec member of the IEEE Ro-Man Standing Steering Committee. She received her PhD. on Computer Engineering from the University of Campinas, Unicamp (Brazil) in 2005. She was a post-doc at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex (England, UK) for 3 years. Her research interests include but are not restricted to Evolutionary and Bio-inspired Robotics, Swarm Robotics, Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Human–Robot Interaction, Rehabilitation Robotics and Neurorobotics.