Pauline Chevalier

Dr Pauline Chevalier obtained her PhD in Informatics at the University Paris-Saclay (France) in 2016 and her BSc (2012) and MSc (2013) in Electronic Engineering at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (France). She did her Ph.D. thesis at the Robotics and Computer Vision Lab (ENSTA-ParisTech, France) under the supervision of Adriana Tapus, Jean-Claude Martin and Brice Isableu. The subject was on the impact of visual and proprioceptive sensory preferences of individuals diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on their social skills during human-robot interactions. Then, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) in the HMI lab, with Vanessa Evers and Dirk Heylen. There, she joined DE-ENIGMA, a H2020 European project which aims to design robot-assisted interventions to teach emotions to children diagnosed with ASD. Throughout her experience in the area of robot-assisted interventions for children diagnosed with ASD, she observed that sensory sensitivities were seldom-considered, whereas they showed to have an impact. Thanks to the MINDED programme, she will explore and investigate sensory sensitivity of children diagnosed with ASD, with the approach of robot-assisted intervention techniques. She aims to bring insights for better and more adapted human-robot interaction but also for diagnosis and therapy for children diagnosed with ASD.