Julia Stojak Maurer ’90, P ’18, ’20, ’22, ’23, ’28, Mercersburg Academy associate head of school for school life, has been appointed a RoboCup Federation Trustee. RoboCup, an international competition founded in 1996, promotes the use and advancement of artificial intelligence and robotics, and Maurer has been involved on the international level for a number of years.
“I really thought this would be my last year on the international planning group for a while as it was my last year as an executive committee member with six years of consecutive service (after three years on the Organizing Committee for Rescue),” Maurer said. “When both the current president and the president-elect approached me with the nomination to be a trustee, it took me aback.”
Maurer says high school teachers are not usually the typical profile for a trustee. Instead, trustees tend to be university robotics professors and robotics industry professionals. During the week leading up to the vote in Eindhoven, Netherlands (the location of the 2024 international RoboCup competition), Maurer participated in a 90-minute session where the entire group of trustees questioned her about education and robotics.
“The whole nomination process felt supportive and overwhelming all at the same time,” she said, noting that the only other current female trustee at the time of her nomination out of a group of more than 20 individuals was a Disney robotics engineer based out of Switzerland.
As a newly appointed RoboCup trustee, Maurer is spearheading the effort to bring the inaugural SuperRegional competition for junior teams in the Americas to Mercersburg in the spring of 2025. The event would welcome more than 150 robotics teams from North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean to Mercersburg for several days of competition in rescue, soccer, simulation and onstage performance events. Remaining team slots would be made available to teams from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Her proposal to host the event at the Academy was unanimously approved by the other trustees.
Maurer created Mercersburg’s robotics curriculum in 2004, took her first class to a national robotics competition in 2006 at MIT, and attended her first international RoboCup event with a student team in 2007. “I am so, so grateful that Mercersburg has been supportive of my work on this front.”
