Gabriella Waters is an artificial intelligence researcher who serves as the Director of the Center for Responsible AI, Director of the Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab, and the Robotics and Digital Twin Lab at Virginia State University. She is a founding member of the Maryland Responsible AI Council and an AI policy advisor at state, federal, and international levels. Gabriella has served as a research associate at NIST in the AI Innovation Lab, where she led AI testing and evaluation efforts for the ARIA project.

Gabriella is committed to increasing the diversity of thought in technology and advocates for interdisciplinary collaborations to advance innovation, responsibility, explainability, transparency, and ethics in AI development and application. Her research explores the intersections of human neurobiology & learning, the quantification of ethics in AI/ML systems, neuro-symbolic architectures, embodied AI, and the design of intelligent systems that leverage these foundations for enhanced human-computer synergy. She is especially focused on developing technological innovations that support neurodiverse populations.