Jean founded Lavoro with a long-term conviction: that innovations should be accessible to ordinary people. Her vision is a world where anyone can easily use robots to get things done. Lowering that barrier is what Lavoro is built to do.
As an Associate Research Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics Institute and Director of the Bot Intelligence Group (BIG), Jean began researching agentic models and how to use language to command and control robots long before the broader AI community turned its attention to the problem. She created a graduate course, Integrated Intelligence in Robotics: Vision Language Planning nearly ten years ago. Her recent work on arts and robotics extends this theme to explore how robots can collaborate with people in expressive, safe, and deeply human-centered ways. Her work has earned best paper awards at ICRA, IROS, and HRI, and has been covered by the New York Times and others.
Prior to joining the faculty at CMU, Jean was a commercialization specialist at National Robotics Engineering Center, where she converted research prototypes to high TRL innovations. She is currently working hands-on with Lavoro's manufacturing and lab automation customers, where language-driven robot control is already making a difference.
Mooyeon co-founded Lavoro because she has witnessed firsthand the gap between what robot technology can do and what actually gets deployed in the real world. Prior to Lavoro, as Chief Medical Officer of Burke Rehabilitation Hospital at Montefiore Health System and a Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she has spent years deploying various technical innovations in clinical settings and has learned exactly where and why they succeed or fail.
Mooyeon leads Lavoro's operations, market research, and customer discovery, bringing her executive credibility and deep understanding of user needs to every conversation with potential customers and partners. Her current focus is on one of the most urgent opportunities in physical AI: healthcare, where the labor shortage is not a distant problem; it is acute today.
Mooyeon ensures Lavoro's healthy growth as an organization, building sound team culture that will carry this mission forward.
