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About

Nicole Salomons is a human-robot interaction (HRI) researcher whose work spans socially assistive robotics, robot social influence, and the design of robots that meaningfully support human behavior and wellbeing. She is perhaps best known for her pioneering longitudinal study on social robots as therapeutic tools for children with autism spectrum disorder, demonstrating that month-long, home-based robot interventions could meaningfully improve social communication skills — work that has garnered over 347 citations and shifted the field away from brief, lab-controlled studies. Her classroom-based research on emotional storytelling and narrative role-play further established robots as effective educational companions, particularly for developing children's social and emotional understanding across both individual and group settings. Salomons has also made significant contributions to understanding robot social influence, including a compelling series of studies examining human conformity to robotic groups — creatively adapting Asch's classic conformity paradigm to the HRI context. Her work on prosocial responses to mistreated robots opens intriguing questions about human empathy toward machines. More recently, she has advanced predictive modeling of robot social influence through her RoSI framework and explored in-home robotic coaching for exercise guidance. With over 800 cumulative citations, Salomons' research consistently bridges fundamental social psychology with real-world robotic applications.