Doctoral Thesis Project: Vibrotactile Displays for promoting Social Interaction: Multimodal modulation of sensorimotor adaptation

Facial expressions are an important vehicle of communication and create an intimate link with the people around us. A disruption in an individual’s ability to see or make facial expressions reduces the rich dynamic of face-to-face communication and can significantly diminish quality of life. The goal of my work is to develop vibrotactile displays for promoting social interaction. Specifically, I intend to encode the motoric components of facial expression via stimulus patterns that are learnable and take into account the perceptual capacities of the human user. To this end, I investigate methods for learning tactile representations, develop vibrotactile displays and design multimodal experimental paradigms for studying facial expression perception and execution through adaptation.

I am a PhD student in the Cognitive Systems research group in affiliation with the Graduate Training Center of Neuroscience (GTC) at the University of Tübingen. Prior to my doctoral studies, I received a MSc degree in Neural Information Processing from the GTC in Tübingen, and was in the USA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where I received a BSc Degree in Electrical Engineering with minors in Bioengineering and Technology & Management, and conducted graduate academic research in Neural Engineering. I have developed and taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in Biomedical Instrumentation and Biosignal Processing at the UIUC Bioengineering Department and at the German-Jordanian University (GJU) Biomedical Engineering Department. I am a Palestinian-Jordanian Third Culture Kid (TCK), born and raised in an international oil community in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.