Maria (Masha) Shugrina is a senior research scientist at the NVIDIA Toronto AI Lab, where she manages a group focused on creative applications of AI and efforts to accelerate research. Her key research interest is enabling AI to work in the interactive loop, enhancing rather than replacing creativity. Masha earned her PhD at the University of Toronto, receiving Canada's Alain Fournier Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Computer Graphics, and her master's at MIT. Previously, Masha worked at Adobe Research as a research engineer and at Google as a senior software engineer. She enjoys oil painting in her spare time.