Experience

PhD Student at ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne

UX Researcher & Designer at ConnectedCare

Joint-PhD student in learning sciences in the JDPLS program at ETHZ and EPFL in the Social Brain Sciences Lab under the supervision of Prof. Emily S. Cross, Dr. Nathan Caruana, and Prof. Josie Hughes focusing on perception and application areas of social robots in the classroom.

User experience researcher and designer at ConnectedCare working on the development and deployment of technological health care solutions. We are working on a social companion robot to support long COVID and stroke patients with their rehabilitation.

Student Research Assistant at Utrecht University

Six months student research assistantship at Utrecht University under the supervision of Reine van der Wal. The lab works on relationships and our work focused on dyadic coping of chronically ill children and their parents. I analysed dyadic data using the Actor-Partner-Interdepence Model in R. Additionally, I created the lab website.

Research Assistant at Utrecht University

Three months research assistantship at Utrecht Universiteit under the supervision of Ruud Hortensius and Baptiste Liefdhooge. The lab works on human-AI interaction and is interested in investigating human’s perception and exposure to AI. I worked on developing a new tool to measure exposure to AI, as well as on designing an experiment to assess human’s trust in computer-generated faces.

Research Internship at INRIA Paris

Three months research internship at the Cognitive Machine Learning Lab at INRIA under the supervision of Justine Cassell. The lab works on rapport in human-human and human-agent interactions and is interested in investigating conversational strategies that lead to rapport and consequences hereof. During my internship I worked on the development of a new task paradigm, that allows to collect new data on rapport-building interactions.

Research Internship at University of Glasgow

Three months research internship at the Social Brain in Action and Social Robots Laboratory at the University of Glasgow, under the Supervision of Anna Henschel, Ruud Hortensius and Emily Cross. During my three months internship I applied Photogrammetry (manual available here) in order to measure brain activity in the social TPJ and STS using fNIRS. Additionally, I helped with data collection using fMRI after being safety trained. Next to this project, I collected motion capture data, took part in the lab meetings and learned about social robotics with Pepper, NAO, and Cozmo.

Research Assistant at German Centre for Higher Education and Science Research

I worked as a student research assistant at the DZHW (German Centre for Higher Education and Science Research) under the supervision of Malte Hückstädt. The focus was on research collaborations in team science where I helped supported the theoretical background, the online survey and data collection.

Conferences and Events

ICSR + AI Conference, Naples, 2025

Paper presentation, „Empathy in child-robot interaction“

IEEE RO-MAN Conference, 2025

Paper presentation, „Teachers perceive distinct competency profiles in soft and hard social robots to support learning“

Poster presentation, „Towards Hands-on Learning to Support Technical Literacy“

JPDLS spring school, 2025

Poster presentation, „Soical robots in the classroom“

R Ladies Event, Zurich, 2024

Invited Panel talk, „The role of gender and sex in data collection and analysis“

European Robotics Forum 2023

Invited panel talk on applying social robots in health care

Radboud University Behavioral Sciences Conference 2022

Radboud University Behavioral Sciences Conference 2021

FRIAS SpoHuMA 2021

Thesis presentation, „Reciprocity and relationship formation in child-robot interaction“

Poster presentation, „Maternal Stress and Child Obesity“

Paper presentation, ”I Like You, as a Friend”: Voice Assistants’ Response Strategies to Sexual Harassment and Their Relation to Gender.