Marieke T.H. van Otterdijk (Ph.D. 2024) is a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Communication Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is part of the ROBOT-BOND project where she investigates human-robot bonding with a specific focus on children in special primary education.
She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Psychology from the Fontys Hogeschool in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and a Master of Science degree in Industrial Design from the University of Technology Eindhoven in the Netherlands. After graduation, she worked as a researcher for the University of Oslo in the Multimodal Elderly Care Systems (MECS). This project led to her PhD at the Informatics department at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she focused on Human Intuitive Understanding of Nonverbal Communication by Social Robots as part of the Predictive Intuitive Robot Companion (PIRC) project.