Sahika Genc is a senior applied scientist at Amazon artificial intelligence (AI). Her research interests are in smart automation, robotics, predictive control and optimization, and reinforcement learning (RL), and she serves in the industrial committee for the International Federation of Automatic Control. She leads science teams in scalable autonomous driving and automation systems, including consumer products such as AWS DeepRacer and SageMaker RL. Previously, she was a senior research scientist in the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Laboratory at the General Electric (GE) Global Research Center, where she led science teams on healthcare analytics and collaborated with government organizations and research institutions to develop energy analytics for consumers and utilities, served in the organizing committees for the American Control Conference, and was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. She has more than 30 patents and 50 conference, journal, and technical report publications. She earned her MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering systems from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.