Katerina Pastra is a Senior Researcher (Grade B) at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center and Head of the Language and Robots Lab. She founded and directed for a decade (2010–2020) the Institute of Cognitive Research and Technology (ICRT), an interdisciplinary research organization specializing in multimodal cognition, embodied language processing, and multisensory perception, whose activities have since been integrated into the Athena Research Center.

Her research combines theoretical contributions, experimental findings, and technology development in the areas of semantics and cognition. Drawing inspiration from the functioning of the human brain, she develops software that enables intelligent systems and cognitive robots to understand natural language and relate it to what they perceive through their senses and to their actions.

Since her postdoctoral years, Katerina has designed and coordinated her own basic research and R&D projects, including the POETICON series of European-funded projects, which spanned more than seven years and involved an international, interdisciplinary consortium. Among other distinctions, she has received the John Latsis Foundation Award for research on sketch–language semantic interaction in Cartoon Art, a Google Award for organizing a workshop at the AAAI Conference on vision–language grounding technologies, and a Best Paper Award from the British Computer Society for the development of multimedia technology for forensic police departments.

Her teaching experience includes postgraduate-level instruction in the United Kingdom and Greece, in Master’s programmes in Computer Science, Data Science, and Language Technology. She has taught courses such as Language and Cognitive Robotics, Natural Language Processing, Search Engines and Web Data Mining, and Human–Computer Interaction and Graphical User Interfaces.

Katerina has published extensively in high-impact international conferences and journals, including Nature (e.g. Large-scale verbal elicitation of object affordances and co-speech gestures) and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (e.g. The Minimalist Grammar of Action). She serves as an Associate Editor for the journals Interaction Studies and Cognitive Computation and Systems, and has extensive experience in evaluating research and innovation projects and proposals.

She has been an invited speaker at numerous events, including TEDx talks and scientific events of the European Parliament, and has contributed by invitation to a significant number of international innovation think tanks. Katerina is a strong advocate of Open Science. Together with her collaborators, she has developed 14 datasets and four software tools, all released fully open-access. She is a Senior Member of IEEE, President of the Board of the Athena Research Center Researchers’ Association, and a member of the Gender Equality Committee of the Athena Research Center, through which she actively promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion within the research ecosystem.