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About

Elena Corina Grigore is a leading researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction (HRI) and socially assistive robotics, with a focus on making robots more intuitive, trustworthy, and effective collaborators. Her work spans three key areas: developing robots that can teach and engage with children, enabling fluid human-robot collaboration in physical tasks, and understanding the social dynamics that build trust between humans and machines. Her most influential work, "How to train your DragonBot" (124 citations), demonstrated how a socially assistive robot could successfully teach nutrition to a diverse group of first-graders over multiple sessions, showing high levels of child engagement. In "Joint action understanding improves robot-to-human object handover" (91 citations), she established that robots capable of predicting human intentions are perceived as safer and more trustworthy—a foundational insight for collaborative robotics. Grigore has also pioneered preference-based assistance prediction for collaborative tasks and explored how verbal communication and mimicry shape perceptions of robot social presence. Her research has been published in top venues including the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Through her work, Grigore is helping to create robots that are not just functional tools, but genuine partners capable of teaching, assisting, and building rapport with people.