Experience

Research Consultant

Disney Research, The Walt Disney Company

Research consulting on interactive AI characters, multimodal learning, and data-driven character animation.

Lecturer

ETH Zurich

Course creator and lecturer for:

  • Artificial Intelligence for Digital Characters (Spring, 2024–present)
  • Seminar on Digital Humans (Fall, 2022–present)

Senior Researcher

Computer Graphics Laboratory, ETH Zurich

Lead of the Digital Character AI team. PI of the SNF Ambizione grant Data-Driven Animation Synthesis for Stylized Characters and Co-PI in the NRF Singapore CREATE programme Future Health Technologies 2. Developing models that combine large language models, affective computing, and data-driven animation to create embodied conversational agents with autonomous agency, consistent values, and beliefs.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Computer Graphics Laboratory, ETH Zurich

Researcher / PhD Student

Computer Graphics Laboratory, ETH Zurich

Education

Dr. sc. (PhD) in Computer Science

ETH Zurich

Thesis: Multimodal Affective State Prediction in Mobile Settings. Supervised by Prof. Dr. Markus Gross.

Master's Degree in Computer Science

ETH Zurich

Thesis: Engagement Detector: Modelling Engagement Dynamics in Virtual Environments.

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

ETH Zurich

Thesis: Diff library in Eiffel (Diffeif).
Awards
Honorable Mention Paper Award
IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI), Minneapolis ∙ 2026
For the paper Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars.
Best Paper Honorable Mention
18th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games (MIG), Zurich ∙ 2025
For the paper PhonemeNet: A Transformer Pipeline for Text-Driven Facial Animation.
Best Paper Honorable Mention
25th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), Berlin ∙ 2025
For the paper BEE: Belief-Value-Aligned, Explainable, and Extensible Cognitive Framework for Conversational Agents.
Professional Service

Conference reviewer: ACM CHI (2021–2025), ACM UIST (2026), ACM CSCW (2022–2026), ACM ICMI (2022–2025), ECCV (2024), Eurographics (2023), ACM CUI (2023–2026), ACM ISWC (2025), ACM MobileHCI (2025), ACM TEI (2024), HAI (2023), ACM ISS (2021–2022)

Journal reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2026), ACM IMWUT (2022–2025), JMIR Serious Games (2026), IEEE Access (2023)

Languages
100%
German Native
100%
English Fluent
60%
French Intermediate