Tessa Beinema works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Communication Science department, where she investigates human-robot bonding in the context of the ROBOT-BOND project. She is specifically interested in human-robot bonding for adolescents with mood disorders (e.g., depression) in the mental healthcare setting.
In a broader sense she investigates applications to support processes such as coaching, counselling and decision-making. She has a special interest in applying conversational agents and robots for such purposes in settings that require a multidisciplinary approach, such as healthcare.
She has a background in Artificial Intelligence (bachelors and masters from Radboud University) with a specialization in Web and Language Interaction. After graduation, Tessa started working as a junior researcher at Roessingh Research and Development, while also being an external PhD candidate at the University of Twente. In the Horizon 2020 Council of Coaches project (2017-2020), she led the work package on 'coaching strategies and knowledge base'. In her PhD work, she investigated how knowledge of behaviour change and coaching can practically be incorporated into an artificially intelligent component for selecting relevant (tailored) conversational topics in coaching conversations between users and (embodied) conversational agents. She also contributed to the two open-source projects that resulted from Council of Coaches: the WOOL Dialogue Platform (rebranded to DialogueBranch) and the Agents United Platform.
Once the Council of Coaches project was completed, Tessa joined the Personalized eHealth Technology (PeHT) programme at the University of Twente, where she finished her PhD and her tasks included the coordination of the Agents United Alliance, contributing to the development of a new telemonitoring platform, and being a coordinator for the VNSU Digital Society Health & Well-being programme line.
Following completion of her PhD, she joined the Human-Media Interaction group, where she worked on the virtual assistant within the ZonMw eCG Family Clinic project. Between March 2022 and September 2023, she also worked at Innovation Sprint on virtual coaching and digital therapeutics in the context of European projects such as iHelp and RE-SAMPLE.
WORK EXPERIENCE
01.2025 - current Postdoctoral Researcher, Communication Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
03.2022 - 09.2024 Postdoctoral Researcher, Human-Media Interaction group, University of Twente
03.2022 - 09.2023 Researcher Virtual Coaching & AI, Innovation Sprint
09.2020 - 03.2022 Researcher, Biomedical Signals and Systems group, University of Twente; affiliated with the Personalised eHealth Technology strategic programme
09.2017 - 12.2021 PhD Candidate, Biomedical Signals and Systems group, University of Twente
09.2017 - 09.2020 Junior Researcher, eHealth group, Roessingh Research and Development
LINKS
ORCID | Google Scholar | ResearchGate | LinkedIn | Personal website
