Since September 2017, I have been working towards my Ph.D. within the HCI Lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, advised by Dr. Edith Law. The focus of my Ph.D. is on designing interactions of pedagogical conversational agents that promote social experiences in the context of learning outcomes. I am using different types of agents, from chatbots to physically-embodied robots, and investigating interaction strategies for in the classroom and beyond. In support of my research, I was awarded The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postgraduate Scholarship-Doctoral (PGS D) award in May 2019.
Prior to Waterloo, I completed an M.Sc. cum laude, in Human-Machine Communication (2016) from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, within the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Bernoulli Institute, and a B.Sc. in Cognitive Systems: Cognition and Brain (2014), from the University of British Columbia in Canada.
My research interests began with increasing our understanding of human cognition in order to better design interactions with technology, specifically those that can improve the lives of people. During my M.Sc. I concentrated on improving voice perception for cochlear implant wearers, developing an electroencephalography (EEG) brain-computer interface for neurofeedback, as well as conducting psychoacoustic experiments to investigate how the comparison and integration of the different sound signals in bimodal hearing impacts perception of voice characteristics in speech. At the end of my M.Sc. I was awarded the Avril McDonald Prize by the University of Groningen.