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About

Sarah Strohkorb is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on how social robots can facilitate and enhance collaboration among humans, especially children in educational settings. Her most influential work, "Improving Human-Human Collaboration Between Children with a Social Robot" (2016, 46 citations), broke new ground by shifting attention away from direct human-robot teaming and toward the understudied question of whether robots can serve as catalysts for better human-to-human cooperation. This insight has meaningful implications for deploying robots in classrooms and group learning environments. Strohkorb has also made notable contributions to understanding group dynamics in robotic contexts. Her 2015 paper on classifying children's social dominance (23 citations) developed methods for robots to automatically detect and respond to hierarchical social cues — a critical capability for robots navigating multi-child interactions. Her broader work on promoting collaboration with social robots and establishing sustained human-robot relationships underscores her commitment to making robots not merely functional tools, but socially intelligent partners. With nearly 100 cumulative citations across her key publications, Strohkorb's research has helped define an emerging and consequential subfield at the intersection of robotics, education, and social psychology.