Barbara Grosz has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1986, first as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and currently as Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences. She is widely known for her contributions to artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of natural-language processing and multiagent systems. She developed some of the earliest and most influential computer dialogue systems and established the research field of computational modeling of discourse. Her research in computer science, focused on finding ways to make computers behave more intelligently, draws also on work in linguistics, psychology, economics, and philosophy. She has written influential papers on techniques for enabling computer systems to participate in dialogues in natural languages (for instance, English and Japanese) and for building systems that act collaboratively.

Barbara was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, the American Philosophical Society in 2003, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. She is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Grosz earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Cornell University and master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.