Gaeun Lee presented her poster with Rabia Ibtasar and Joe Michaelis, "I think we did CS today:" Student's Complex Perceptions of CS in an Introductory Social Robotics Program at the 2026 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research.

Veronica Grosso shared her work on reducing gender bias in human-robot interaction in a poster session at the Computing Research Association's Graduate Cohort Workshop. Her poster shows alternate ways of evoking robot competence without gendered roles.

Our work to build an afterschool program for women in computing with multi-level mentoring, a social robotics curriculum and a computational thinking scaffolding tool was awarded a 3-year, $500,000 grant (NSF #2342099) from the NSF ITEST program.

UIC LIT Lab was award $435,000 as part of a 3-year, $1.2M NSF Grant in collaboration with University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Chicago for the project Designing Social Companion Robots for Long-term Interaction.

An amazing team of UIC Engineering and Learning Sciences faculty were awarded a new 3-year, $600,000 grant (NSF #2302171) for a Research Experiences for Teachers project on Computational Modeling and Simulation for STEM Education.