Rate My Professor Nicole Robinson

Dr. Nicole Robinson is a Research Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University. She holds cross-appointments with the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences and is affiliated with the School of Psychological Sciences. Robinson earned her Doctor of Philosophy from the School of Psychology and Counselling at Queensland University of Technology between 2015 and 2018. Since February 2020, she has served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Associate at Monash University in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering. She also holds positions as University Lecturer at Monash University, Adjunct Lecturer at the QUT Centre for Robotics, and Research Affiliate at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision.

Her research specializations include human-robot interaction, social robotics, robot and AI ethics, healthcare and medical robotics, psychological and behavioural science, behaviour change, and psychosocial interventions. Robinson has led clinical trials and experimental studies using humanoid and socially interactive robots, notably a pilot randomized controlled trial where social robots delivered a behavior change intervention for diet and weight reduction, resulting in participants achieving over 50% reduction in snack episodes and an average weight loss of 4.4 kg. Key publications encompass "Social robots as treatment agents: Pilot randomized controlled trial to deliver a behavior change intervention" (2020), "A Review of Evaluation Practices of Gesture Generation in Embodied Conversational Agents" (2022), "Robotic Vision for Human-Robot Interaction and Collaboration: A Survey and Systematic Review" (2022), "Human-Robot Team Performance Compared to Full Robot Autonomy in 16 Real-World Search and Rescue Missions" (2022), and the book "Experimental Methodology for Human–Robot Interaction: Guidelines and Case Studies for Human-Centred and Ethical Robotics Research" (2025). Her scholarship has amassed 762 citations on ResearchGate, with first-author publications in top-tier journals such as Science Robotics. Awards and honors include recognition at the Women in AI Asia-Pacific Awards (2024), three Best Paper Awards at the International Conference on Social Robotics, and the Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship. As Co-Founder and CEO of Lyro Robotics, she develops intelligent robotic systems for the food supply chain, while serving as Chief Investigator at an Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre, Investigator at Creative Destruction Lab-Melbourne, and advisor to the National AI Centre, alongside roles in science communication and keynotes.