Dr Anna Ciaunica is a Principal Investigator at the Group of Artificial Intelligence for People and Society (GAIPS) INESC-ID, Lisbon Portugal (https://gaips.inesc-id.pt) where she leads the Co-Embodied Self lab (CELab). Anna is also Honorary Research Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, the UK (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/icn/research/research-groups/social- neuroscience)

Before that she worked at the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, the UK; and postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She obtained her PhD from the Université de Dijon, France, with a thesis on Physicalism and Qualia.

She was recently awarded a prestigious Lorentz Fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) to work on the project ‘Hybrid Agencies: Crossing Borders between Biological and Artificial Worlds’.

Her work aims to advance our understanding of the fundamental neurophysiological mechanisms of the human mind. She focuses on embodiment and self-consciousness in humans and artificial agents from a developmental perspective. Anna’s research methodology is highly interdisciplinary, blending tools from phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, robotics and AI. 

Anna currently leads four interdisciplinary projects looking at the effect of interacting with artificial minds and bodies on the human self. She is also associate editor to Neuroscience of Consiousness journal. Anna is actively and relentlessly working on building bridges between academia and wider communities, arts and industry.