Dr. Charbonneau joined the University of Calgary as Assistant Professor in September 2021, following post-doctoral work in humanoid robotics at the University of Waterloo and a PhD in Advanced and Humanoid Robotics from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and the Università Degli Studi di Genova. Dr. Charbonneau works to make human-robot interactions safe, comfortable, and intuitive. Dr. Charbonneau’s work in whole-body control regulates the forces between robots and their environment, towards ensuring respectful and reliable interactions with people. For instance, Dr. Charbonneau has programmed a humanoid robot to waltz with human partners, and currently works on increasing a robot's awareness of physical contacts. In parallel, while exploring the visibility of their queer identity, Dr. Charbonneau initiated research on the experience of queer individuals in engineering education.

Preston Culberson is an Incoming Assistant Professor at Cornell University. Preston is interested in building collaborative robots that can understand and interact with their environment, humans, and other robots. Preston's primary research interests are adaptive and learning-based control, manipulation and grasping, and multi-agent interaction and coordination, especially without communication. Preston received a PhD from Stanford University in 2022 under the supervision of Mac Schwager and was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology with Aaron Ames.  

Maru Cabrera is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). Her research interests focus on aspects of Human-Robot Interaction intersecting with accessibility; working on service robots that can help people with mobility limitations or target populations like older adults by collaborating to complete tasks at home. Before being an Assistant Professor, she was a a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington working with Maya Cakmak in the Human-Centered Robotics Lab. She obtained her PhD from Purdue University in 2018 under the supervision of Dr. Juan P. Wachs in the Intelligent Systems and Assistive Technologies (ISAT) Lab. Her dissertation topic was about One-Shot Gesture Recognition. After that, she did a postdoc with Dr. Maya Cakmak in the Human Centered Robotics Lab (HCR). 

Nadia Figueroa is the Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds secondary appointments in Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering and is a core faculty of the GRASP laboratory. Before joining Penn, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group (part of CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She obtained a Ph.D. in Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Prior to this, she spent time as a Research Assistant in the Robotics and Mechatronics Institute at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and at NYU Abu Dhabi. She holds a B.Sc. in Mechatronics from Monterrey Tech and M.Sc. in Automation and Robotics from TU Dortmund. Her research focuses on developing tightly coupled learning, control and estimation algorithms to achieve fluid human-robot collaborative autonomy with safety, efficiency and robustness guarantees. This involves research at the intersection of machine learning, control theory, artificial intelligence, perception, biomechanics and psychology - with a physical human-robot interaction perspective. She has received several honors for her contributions to robotics, including being a finalist for the Georges Giralt PhD award, the KUKA innovation award and receiving best paper awards and nominations at major robotics conferences and journals.

Roberto Martin-Martin is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His research bridges robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, focusing on enabling robots to operate autonomously in human-centric, unstructured environments such as homes and offices. To achieve this, he develops advanced AI algorithms grounded in reinforcement learning, imitation learning, planning, and control. His work also addresses challenges in robot perception, including pose estimation, tracking, video prediction, and scene understanding. Martin-Martin earned his Ph.D. from the Berlin Institute of Technology (TUB) with Oliver Brock and later conducted postdoctoral research at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab under the mentorship of Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese. His contributions have been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the RSS Best Systems Paper Award, ICRA Best Paper Award, IROS Best Mechanism Award, RSS Pioneer designation, and he was part of the team that won the Amazon Picking Challenge. Beyond academia, he serves as chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mobile Manipulation and is a co-founder of QueerInRobotics, promoting diversity and inclusion in the field.