Dr. D.F. (Deborah) Forster

Dr. D.F. (Deborah) Forster

Profile

I’m the transdisciplinary lead at FRAIM, developing and practicing transdisciplinary research & innovation. I was trained as a primatologist and cognitive scientist at UC San Diego. Now also a researcher in the HRI group of the cognitive robotics department at TU Delft.

I leveraged my long-term academic research–into the social complexity and distributed cognition of wild olive baboons in Kenya–to extend deep involvement into design research, human-robot interaction, and architecture education. My guiding stance is a commitment to understanding expert sense-making and collaborative dynamics as a path to civically meaningful activism.

I now have over two decades of experience with complex socio-technical systems, embedded in engineering and design projects spanning academia and industry in diverse areas: mobility (design, driver support systems and autonomous vehicles), healthcare (facial expressions and pain in social mammals, infant fingerprinting, etc) and learning (e.g., kid friendly robots in early childhood education, automated adaptive tutoring).

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