Dr. Carolin Straßmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Ruhr West (HRW) specializing in human-technology interaction. 

After completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Applied Cognitive and Media Science, she pursued her doctoral thesis on target-group-related effects of a virtual agent’s appearance at the University of Duisburg-Essen under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Nicole Krämer.

She currently leads and coordinates the BMBF-funded competence center RuhrBots that aims to investigate the diversity- and need-related application of social robots in city institutions. 

To the COURAGE project she contributes her extensive knowledge on psychological experiment design in interdisciplinary fields, social and media psychological expertise as well as her enthusiasm for innovative (also AI enriched) teaching methods. Her current projects, "Learnflix," "VGather2Learn," and "Digifall," concentrate on collaborative learning technologies designed to facilitate online discussions and reviews of learning videos among learners.