Dr Minja Axelsson is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department in the School of MACS (Mathematical and Computer Sciences) at Heriot-Watt University. Her research focuses on the ethical design of human-robot interactions and social robots, particularly in the context of wellbeing and assistive applications. She examines the ethical and unethical design of robots and other embodied AI through participatory design, empirical experimentation, and socio-technical analysis.
Dr Axelsson received her PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge, where she explored the design and deployment of robotic mental wellbeing coaches. During her PhD, she was a visiting PhD student at MIT Media Lab. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge focusing on the ethics of human-robot partnerships, and was a Teaching Fellow at Cambridge's Centre for Human-Inspired AI. She completed her M.Sc. and B.Sc. at Aalto University in Finland.
Dr Axelsson's research has been featured in outlets such as BBC Click, Fast Company, and the Evening Standard. She was selected as a Human-Robot Interaction pioneer in 2023, and received the inaugural Clare Hall Doctoral Prize Studentship from her college Clare Hall at Cambridge in 2024. You can read more about Dr Axelsson's research on her website: https://minjaaxelsson.com/