About me

I am a senior research scientist/research director (directrice de recherche) in the Inria Center of the University of Lorraine (formerly Inria Nancy Grand-Est) and Loria, and head of the Human Centered Robotics Team (HUCEBOT).  My research is currently focused on robots collaborating with humans. I am interested in combining machine learning with control to improve the prediction, adaptation, and interaction skills of robots. I strongly believe in user evaluation, i.e., making potential end-users evaluate our technologies, to improve usability, trust, and acceptance.

When I joined Inria in 2014, I was one of the founding members of the team LARSEN, directed by Francois Charpillet. Before joining Inria, I was a postdoc in the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab of TU Darmstadt (Germany), with Jan Peters, and in the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) in Paris (France), with Olivier Sigaud and Vincent Padois. I obtained my PhD at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (Italy) with Francesco Nori and Giorgio Metta in 2011. I defended my French Habilitation to Direct Research (HDR) in November 2022. In 2023 I was a visiting expert in the robotics lab at ESA / ESTEC.

In 2026 I co-founded the startup Bleu Robotics with Jean-Baptiste Mouret and Benoit Berkoukchi.

I am currently serving as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2025-…). In the past, I served as the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics (2021-2024), and as Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2017-2021), for which I received the IEEE RA-L Distinguished Service Award as Outstanding Associate Editor. I was the Program Chair of IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2019 and  IEEE ARSO 2023 and Program Co-Chair of HUMANOIDS 2026. I was the General Chair of IEEE-RAS HUMANOIDS 2024. I organized the 1st euROBIN coopetition, and the International Robotics Week 2024 in Nancy.

I served the GDR Robotique (the French Robotics Society) as co-lead of the GT7 Humanoid Robotics (2021-2023); I have been serving IEEE RAS as co-chair of the ICRA Steering Committee (2022-2023) , the Associate Vice-President of the IEEE RAS MAB (2022-2025), and I am currently serving as a member of AdCOM of IEEE RAS (2025-2028).

I obtained the Suzanne Zivi Award 2020 for excellence in research; I was nominated by Robohub and Women in Robotics in the list of “50 Women in Robotics you need to know about” in 2021, and by Roboto in the list of “Women in Humanoid Robotics & Embodied AI” in 2026. I was one of the Judges of the ANA Avatar Xprize competition where robots were teleoperated to be avatars!

I am currently involved in the following projects:

Upcoming events:

  • 3rd PEPR O2R Week in Nancy (TBA, 2027) – my team is organizing the week at the Inria Center of the University of Lorraine and Loria!

Past events: