Ramona Merhej

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About

Ramona Merhej investigates the intersection of human-robot interaction and creative cognition, with a particular focus on how social robots can serve as collaborative partners to stimulate human creativity. Her most-cited work, "Sparking Creativity with Robots: A Design Perspective" (2019, 11 citations), presents a pioneering design and evaluation framework for a robot that engages humans in collaborative drawing tasks. This research is grounded in the well-established principle that collaboration toward a shared goal is a powerful catalyst for creative thinking. By positioning the social robot as a peer rather than a tool, Merhej challenges traditional notions of creativity as a solitary endeavor, opening new avenues for understanding how embodied artificial agents can actively nourish human creative processes. Her contributions are especially relevant to the growing fields of socially assistive robotics and human-centered AI, where fostering innovation and divergent thinking is paramount. Though early in her career, Merhej’s work offers a compelling vision of robots not just as assistants, but as co-creators that can enhance our most human of traits: imagination.