I am an assistant professor at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). My position is specifically in Virtual Simulation of Human Conversational Behavior, and is embedded in the Language Sciences for Social Good consortium.

Previously I worked as postdoc with Judith Holler in the Communication in Social Interaction (CoSI) group, based at the Donders Centre for Cognition and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. My research largely focused on using motion tracking to capture movement kinematics and their role in social communicative behavior, and in particular for the signaling of social actions.

Apart from research, I enjoy art (drawing, watercolor, and urban sketching, mostly), bouldering, (barefoot) running, martial arts, gaming, and spending time with my family.

In between research and leisure, I also very much like solving problems in Python, and generally working on methodology and making quantitative methods more accessible. In line with this, I’m part of the ENVISIONbox team, where we develop methods tutorials and open code, and provide workshops and summer/winterschools.

General Research Interests

I’m interested in how our environment and our embodiment shapes the way that we communicate and understand one another. For this I’m very inspired by, and often drawing upon, work from gesture studies, psycholinguistics, dynamical systems, ecological psychology, and joint action, to name a few. Two of the main research questions I am pursuing with my work are:
How do differences in our physical embodiment, including different neurotypes or differences in sensory processing, shape how we embody and achieve communication?
How can we leverage our understanding of communication or interaction differences in order to improve communication?

Methods: Expertise and Interests

Motion tracking, gesture annotation, kinematic analysis, virtual animation, fMRI, interaction dynamics

Current Teaching & Upcoming Workshops

2025/2026 - coordinating Spraak- en Gebaarherkenning [Speech and Gesture Recognition] - (BSc AI) University of Amsterdam
2025/2026 - co-coordinating Programming in Digital Societies - (core BSc) Amsterdam University College (AUC)

2025 - co-coordinating Unboxing Multimodality: Analysis Pipelines for Behavioral Dynamics - (summerschool) University of Amsterdam
2025 - one-day workshop - “Bringing Together Qualitative and Quantitative Methods for Annotating Multimodal Communicative Behavior” at ACORPO Thematic School hosted by French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)

2024/2025 - coordinating Language, Speech & Dialogue Processing - (BSc AI) University of Amsterdam
2024/2025 - co-coordinating Second Year Master Project - (BSc AI) University of Amsterdam