Margaret Lech

Professor Lech holds an MSc in Physics from the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska (UMCS) in Poland and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Melbourne. She worked as a Research Fellow at Monash University and the Bionic Ear Institute. In 1998, she joined RMIT and progressed to her current position as a Professor. She has co-authored over 160 research papers in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and signal processing. Her research team contributed groundbreaking techniques for automatically detecting emotion and clinical depression from speech signals. For her work in this area, she was awarded an International Patent, and she won the Telstra Innovation Challenge 2010. Her pioneering work extends to modelling and analysing emotional interactions in conversations, detecting interpersonal trust and modelling cognitive load. Margaret has co-supervised over 30 PhD students and four Postdoctoral Fellows. She received the Vice-Chancellor's Research Supervision Excellence Award in 2013 and the RMIT Award for Excellence in Graduate Research in 2019. Her past research grants include VPAC, ARC Linkage, DSI, AOARD, and DSTG. She is currently a co-investigator on the Office of National Intelligence Discovery and ARC Discovery grants.