Mary Pourebadi
Lecturer
Management Information Systems Department
SDSU
Bio
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Mary Pourebadi, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in the Department of Management Information Systems at San Diego State University (SDSU) and has served as an Advisor at the James Silberrad Brown Center for Artificial Intelligence (JSBC-AI). Her research lies at the intersection of applied artificial intelligence, robotics, and Business Intelligence with a focus on building embodied AI systems that can autonomously and adaptively interact with people in real-world environments.
Dr. Pourebadi earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), where she developed expressive and interactive robotic systems for healthcare and education. Her research emphasized human-grounded, data-driven models of behavior, enabling robotic systems—such as robotic patient simulators—to support realistic, safe, and adaptive interaction in human-facing settings beyond the laboratory. At SDSU, her current research advances multimodal and embodied AI for autonomous robotic systems, integrating large language models (LLMs) and vision–language models (VLMs) with perception, reasoning, and control to enable closed-loop decision-making under real-world constraints.
Dr. Pourebadi’s work has been recognized at premier robotics, computing, and healthcare venues, including the flagship ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), ACM HEALTH journal, ICIS, HICSS, AAAI AI‐HRI, IEEE FG, RSS, IPCV, AHA, NDSS, and QRS, and has received multiple honors recognizing her leadership, mentorship, and community impact, including the ACM Certificate of Recognition, CRA-W/GPSA Award, ACM Tapia Awards, and multiple Grace Hopper Celebration awards.
In addition to her research, Dr. Pourebadi teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in AI for Business Applications, robotics, machine learning, and advanced programming languages at SDSU. She emphasizes hands-on, systems-oriented learning and mentors students across disciplines, with a strong commitment to inclusive excellence and student-centered research.
Office Hours
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Courses
MIS 425 - Artificial Intelligence for Business Applications