Dr. Giulia Perugia (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at the Human Technology Interaction group. She holds a BA in Literature and Linguistics from the University of Roma Tre (Italy), a MSc in Cognitive Science (Summa cum Laude) from the University of Siena (Italy), and a double degree PhD in Assistive Technologies from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC, Spain) and TU/e. Before joining the HTI group in 2021, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala Social Robotics Lab (Sweden) from 2018 to 2021. 

As a social scientist, Dr. Perugia's research lies at the intersection of Social Robotics, Social Psychology, and Ethical and Inclusive HRI. In detail, she is interested in studying people’s perceptions of social robots and how they develop over time, especially in unconstrained environments. Moreover, she is interested in understanding whether and how the design of robots (e.g., gendered humanoid robots), as well as people's perception and interaction with them, could reproduce biases and stereotypes existing in society at large. Finally, she has extensively worked on studying how people with dementia interact with leisure technologies, such as social robots, and whether and how these technologies could be used to ameliorate people with dementia's quality of life. Dr. Perugia’s research earned her several awards. She was runner-up for the Best Paper Award at the conferences IEEE RO-MAN 2020 and ACM/IEEE HRI 2022, got shortlisted for the RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award in 2020 after winning it in 2017, and received an honorable mention at the ACM/IEEE HRI conference in 2022.