Research Fellowship
The Peerbots Research Fellowship is a crucial part of Peerbots' commitment to raising the floor of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research and getting more experts involved in HRI research. We aim to support researchers centering people, and specifically experts, in how robots are researched, developed, and used. The fellowship funds an early career researcher or researcher in training to complete at least one study and submit a publication to a leading academic venue.
Meet The Fellows
2026
Hyunju Kim
Hyunju Kim is a PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University. Her research sits at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Robot Interaction, where she designs and studies telepresence robots, avatars, and Mixed Reality (XR) systems for embodied remote collaboration. Her work explores how remote users can participate in shared physical spaces through proxy bodies, and how embodiments shape people’s experiences in collaboration. Her work has been published in venues including CHI, CSCW, and UIST.
Fellowship Focus
Hyunju is replicating and extending HRI work on robot face perception using Vizij.ai - the framework Peerbots is adopting for our free robot faces. Her fellowship work examines how expressive robot faces influence people’s perceptions of robots in interaction, and what these perceptions suggest for the design of robot identities, social cues, and expressive behaviors.
In partnership with
2025
Dylan Thomas Doyle
Dylan Thomas Doyle is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. As an HRI researcher, Dylan’s work focuses on values-based design for robots and the impacts of socio-technical contexts on the perception of robot identity. Outside of research, Dylan is the Director of the AI for All Tomorrows media collective and podcast. Dylan received his PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder, Masters of Divinity from Columbia University, and BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Prior to a career in technology research, Dylan served as a Unitarian Universalist minister and hospital chaplain.
Fellowship Focus
Dylan conducted a qualitative study examining the adoption of expressive faces, like the Peerbots face, for humanoid robots in industry and academia. Dylan focused on understanding the needs that ‘decision-makers’ are taking into consideration about the facial expression of the robots they are designing.
In partnership with