The Organizers & The Speakers

Belkis Ezgi Arikan (organizer)

Belkis Ezgi Arikan is a postdoctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from Philipps University Marburg, where she later worked as a postdoctoral researcher. Her research interests are action-perception coupling, prediction, time perception, multisensory processes and sense of agency. To investigate these, she uses behavioral (psychophysics) and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods.

Müge Cavdan (organizer)

Müge Cavdan is a postdoctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen since 2021. She earned her P.hD. from the same university in Experimental Psychology with a focus on visual and haptic material perception. She was awarded the World Haptics Best Student Paper Award in 2019 and the Best Paper in EuroHaptics 2020. In 2022, she received Innovation in Haptics supported by the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Her research interests include material perception, active and affective touch, timing, and multisensory integration.

Hasti Seifi

Hasti Seifi is an assistant professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interaction, haptics, and social robotics. Her work was recognized by an NSF CAREER award (2024), an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship (2018), the EuroHaptics best Ph.D. thesis award (2017), and a Maria Klawe award for her efforts in computer science diversity and outreach (2017). Hasti serves the HCI and haptics communities in various roles, such as mentoring co-chair for the Haptics Symposium 2024, program co-chair for EuroHaptics 2022, and associate chair for ACM CHI and ACM UIST conferences.

Sarah McIntyre

Dr Sarah McIntyre completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2014, followed by postdoctoral positions at Neuroscience Research Australia and at Linköping University, Sweden. In 2021, she established the Lab for Haptics, Touch and Mechanosensation Research at Linköping University. It is a multi-disciplinary team incorporating expertise from neuroscience, biology, psychology and engineering. Dr McIntyre’s research focuses on understanding human touch sensation, using a variety of techniques to address questions from a whole-system perspective. This includes measuring skin mechanics, peripheral neural coding and human perceptual judgments. A key focus is on characterising and understanding the full range of touch inputs that humans experience in the world, and how the nervous system can process this huge variety of signals to produce functional outcomes.

Thomas Jacobsen

Thomas Jacobsen is Professor of Experimental and Biological Psychology at Helmut Schmidt University - University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg. He obtained his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Leipzig. Jacobsen conducts research mainly in the field of neurocognitive psychology, including auditory processing, language, aesthetic processing, and executive function. He was visiting professor at the University of Vienna, the University of Hamburg, and the Freie Universität Berlin. Thomas Jacobsen is an ordinary member of Academia Europaea, the Academy of Europe. He was President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and is a member of other scientific societies.

Laura Crucianelli

Laura Crucianelli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological & Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary University of London. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship and a Research Fellow at University College London. Her projects investigate affective touch and temperature perception, interoception, and sense of body ownership in healthy and clinical populations. She is also secretary of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). She published over 40 scientific articles and in 2020, her science communication essay, 'The need to touch', was published in AEON. In 2022, she participated to the TEDxLakeComo event with a talk titled "The language of touch".

Saad Nagi

Saad Nagi is an associate professor in neurophysiology at Linköping University, Sweden. His laboratory’s interests revolve around understanding the peripheral nervous system’s role in acute and persistent pain using microneurography (single-unit afferent recordings in awake humans) combined with targeted pharmacological and psychophysical approaches. A particular focus area is understanding how the nervous system creates and modulates perceptions linked to the activation of fast-pain and slow-touch pathways in health and disease.

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