Dr. Lynne Parker is Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT) and Director of the AI Tennessee Initiative, which aims to position Tennessee as a national and global leader in the data-intensive knowledge economy. Previously, she served as Founding Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States. She previously served for two years at the National Science Foundation as Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems. In these roles across three Administrations, she led the development of numerous landmark national AI policies bolstering research, governance, education and workforce training, international engagement, and the Federal use of AI.

Dr. Parker joined the UT faculty in 2002 and is an expert on distributed and intelligent robot systems, human-robot interaction, and AI. She has held numerous other leadership positions besides those noted above, including at UT (Interim Dean of the Tickle College of Engineering) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Distinguished R&D Staff Member and Group Leader). She is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE, and a Distinguished Member of ACM. She received her PhD in computer science from MIT.