funding

Main funding awards, grants, and fellowships received, in reverse chronological order.

2024
Research Fellow
ERC Advanced Grant — e-TALK Project
2024.01 — present
European Research Council · University of Manchester, UK
PI: Prof. Angelo Cangelosi
  • Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ERC Advanced Grant project e-TALK: Embodied Trust, Affect and Language in Human–Robot Interaction.
  • Developing cognitive robot companions capable of earning and maintaining human trust through natural language, facial expression, and affect-aware behaviour.
  • Research spans social HRI, embodied AI, and real-world robot deployments at the Cognitive Robotics Lab.
ERC Advanced
PhD Scholarship
Doctoral Fellowship — ENSTA Paris / Institut Polytechnique de Paris
2020.09 — 2024.01
ENSTA Paris · Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France
Supervisor: Prof. Adriana Tapus
  • Fully-funded doctoral fellowship at ENSTA Paris, one of France's leading engineering schools, within the Autonomous Systems and Robotics group.
  • Research on deep generative models for social robot facial expression generation and self-recognition, culminating in PhD awarded in 2024.
Full Scholarship
Awards & Honors
Award
Best Paper Award Finalist
2025.10 · Abu Dhabi, UAE
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025)
Paper "Learning from Human Conversations: A Seq2Seq based Multi-modal Robot Facial Expression Reaction Framework in HRI" selected as Best Paper Finalist at IROS 2025.
🏆 Finalist
Award
Best Paper Award Finalist
2022.12 · Florence, Italy
International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2022)
Paper "Speech-driven Robot Face Action Generation with Deep Generative Model for Social Robots" selected as Best Paper Finalist at ICSR 2022.
🏆 Finalist
Invited Talk
Invited Talk — IROS 2025 AV & UX Workshop
2025.10 · Abu Dhabi, UAE
IEEE/RSJ IROS 2025 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles and User Experience
"Beyond Signals: Touch, Emotion, and Arousal in Human Driving Behavior" — with Prof. Adriana Tapus.