She is known for her work on robotics/AI and bioinformatics/computational biology and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.
[1] She then moved to Stanford University for her graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of Jean-Claude Latombe.
[1][3] In 2000, Kavraki won the Grace Murray Hopper Award for her work on probabilistic roadmaps.
[13] In 2015, she was the winner of the ABIE Award for Technical Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute.
[14] In 2017, Kavraki was honored with the ACM Athena Lecturer award from the Association for Computing Machinery, which celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to the field of Computer Science.