I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Lyle Ungar and Sharath C. Guntuku. My research is affiliated with the WorldBank and the World Well-Being Project.
My research focuses on trust, wellbeing, and social norms during human-agent interaction, contributing to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Computational Social Science (CSS).
Background & Experience
- Ph.D. in Cognitive Science | Brown University, advised by Bertram Malle
- B.S. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science (minors in Linguistics and German studies) | University of Michigan, advised by John Laird
- Industry Research: Google Gemini (Safety and Responsible AI); Honda Research Institute (Human-Centered Intelligence)
News
- Apr 2026: presenting paper Voice-Based Chatbots for English Speaking Practice in Multilingual Low-Resource Indian Schools: A Multi-Stakeholder Study and chairing the Synergistic with AI session at CHI'26 in Barcelona
- Mar 2026: invited to present at the Special Session by Meta at HRI'26
- Nov 2025: proposal selected for funding by the Heyman AI Innovation Fund and AI-4-AI Lab @ Penn Medicine
- Aug 2025: selected to participate in SICSS-Stanford
- Jun 2025: defended my PhD thesis "Teaching to Trust: How People Interactively Teach Norms to Robots"
Research
Trust in Human-Robot Interaction
Teaching Robot Social Norms
- Instruct or Evaluate: How people choose to teach norms to social robots (HRI'22)
- Learning reward functions from a combination of demonstration and evaluative feedback (HRI'22)
- Calibrated Human-Robot Teaching (RO-MAN'23)
- Norm learning, teaching, and change (Current Opinion in Psychology)
- Cognitive properties of norm representations (Cogsci'21)
- A general methodology for teaching norms to social robots (RO-MAN'20)
Trust and Learning in Healthcare & Education
- Voice-based chatbots for multilingual low-resource schools (CHI'26)
- Chatbot for palliative care communication training
- Mapping the dynamics of patient-doctor trust
Psychological Wellbeing & Agency
- Auditing psychological harms in LLM emotional support (In Submission)
- Measuring gendered agency in global media (In Submission)
- AI-assisted goal-setting
Prosocial Human-Robot Interaction
- Should I help a delivery robot? Cultivating prosocial norms through observations (CHI'24)
- More than just a tool: People's perception and acceptance of prosocial delivery robots as fellow road users (HRI'24 workshop)
Companion Robot for Older Adults
- Older adults’ understanding of signals communicated by robot companions for caregiving (Innovation in Aging)
- Designing intuitively understandable nonverbal communication for consumer home companion robots (In Submission)
(not research)
🎞️ arthouse movie | 🎾 tennis | 𝄢 bass guitar | 🐴 english riding