Doreen Jirak received her Diploma degree in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg, Germany. She worked as a Teaching and Research Associate in the Knowledge Technology Group of Prof. Stefan Wermter and obtained her PhD in 2017, University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research is centered around the understanding of artificial neural networks, especially the paradigm of “Reservoir Computing”, on nonverbal communication with special focus on gesture recognition. The overarching goals of her research are to link principles of (neurally-inspired) learning to human-robot interaction (HRI) as a contribution to the development towards natural and intuitive HRI interactions and social robots. In 2020, she started as a collaborator (postdoc) in the Robotics, Brain, and Cognitive Science Unit (RBCS) at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genoa, Italy, In a joint research collaboration with the NISSAN Motor group, and with Dr. Francesco Rea and Prof. Giulio Sandini she studied the impact of social robots on affective states in humans, extending her research portfolio to include facial expressions and emotion recognition. Currently, Doreen is a research collaborator in the CONTACT unit of Dr. Alessandra Sciutti at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, Italy, where she is working on safety and ergonomics in human-robot collaborative tasks within the VOJEXT project. She is the organizer of several workshops (e.g., IROS, Epirob, ICANN) and has 10 years of teaching experience in relevant AI and machine learning subjects.