She holds a PhD in Information Systems and Computer Engineering from IST, University of Lisbon. She was a Research Assistant at the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group (GAIPS) at INESC-ID Lisbon, a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Social Robotics Lab and an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh. Iolanda’s research interests are in the areas of artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction. She aims to develop autonomous socially intelligent robots that can assist people over long periods of time.