About Jessica

Jessica is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee researching how people interact with social robots in various contexts. She is interested in factors determining whether people discriminate against social robots, and how humans create and perpetuate biases against humanoid robots based on the robot’s perceived ethnicity, race, gender, and age.  Jessica researches the extent of self-disclosure of personal information to robots as a function of the robot's physical appearance. Much of this research has been presented and published in ACM and IEEE human-robot interaction conferences and she is a member of both technical societies.

At Tennessee, Jessica is the Vice President of the Graduate Student Association at the College of Communication, serves on the Chancellor's Advisory Board, represents the College of Communication and Information on the Graduate Student Senate where she serves on the Executive Board as the Technology Officer, and is an instructor for 200 and 300-level classes in the School of Information Sciences.