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About

Marianne Bossema is a human-robot interaction researcher whose work spans two compelling frontiers: social robotics in education and human-machine co-creativity. Her research explores how robots can meaningfully integrate into human experiences, whether supporting children's mathematical learning or enriching the creative lives of older adults. In the educational domain, Bossema has made significant contributions by developing concrete design specifications for social robot math tutors, addressing the critical challenge of intertwining a robot's social behaviors with learning tasks rather than allowing them to become distractions. Her most-cited work (20 citations) laid important groundwork in this area, while her longitudinal study examining child-robot relationships across a nine-month break (8 citations) pushes the field toward understanding truly sustainable educational robots — a rarely explored dimension of long-term human-robot interaction. Equally notable is her pioneering work on human-robot co-creativity with older adults, where she is building a research agenda around collaborative drawing and painting supported by AI-generated content. This work represents some of the first systematic inquiry into this emerging area. With publications spanning 2022–2024 and growing citation momentum across diverse contexts, Bossema is establishing herself as a thoughtful and socially conscious voice in applied social robotics research.