Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American roboticist and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is widely recognized for adapting partially observable Markov decision process from operations research for application in artificial intelligence and robotics. Kaelbling received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1997 for applying reinforcement learning to embedded control systems and developing programming tools for robot navigation. In 2000, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.