Erion Plaku is a Program Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). At NSF, Dr. Plaku is part of the Robust Intelligence cluster and co-leads the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program. Prior to joining NSF, Dr. Plaku was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University (2020-2023) and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Catholic University of America (2010–2020). Dr. Plaku received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Rice University (2008). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics at Johns Hopkins University (2008–2010).