Francesca Cocchella

Francesca Cocchella is a Post Doc and Social Psychology researcher in CONTACT Unit working in Human-Robot Interaction. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating social psychology and cognitive robotics to understand how people experience and interpret robots. By studying diverse stakeholders in real-world contexts, she aim to generate evidence that informs the responsible, socially meaningful design and deployment of robotic technologies.

She completed her PhD with Laude in Cognitive Robotics, Interaction and Rehabilitation Technologies at the University of Genoa, conducted at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) supervised by Dr Alessandra Sciutti and Dr Francesco Rea. Her work combined experimental and qualitative methods to study social cognition, anthropomorphism, trust, social connection, and technology acceptance across diverse application domains, including healthcare, education, museums, and the arts.

Her research has been published in leading journals, including ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), PLOS ONE, and International Journal of Social Robotics (SoRo), and presented at major international conferences such as ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), ACM Human-Agent Interaction (HAI), and IEEE RO-MAN.

She was selected as an HRI Pioneers participant at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026), recognizing emerging researchers with the potential to contribute to the future of the field. She is also actively involved in the international HRI community through the organization of workshops and scientific events, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between robotics, psychology, design, and the social sciences.