Fulbright Alum Emily Cross is heading back to Aotearoa New Zealand 25 years after completing her masters at the University of Otago on a Fulbright award. Emily is returning in 2027 as a Hood Fellow and will be hosted by the University of Auckland.
The Ohio-born professor, has worked and travelled extensively since her time in New Zealand.
We tracked Emily down in Switzerland where she is Professor of Cognitive & Social Neuroscience in the Social Brain Science Lab at ETH Zurich. Before that Emily was in Australia at Western Sydney University and Macquarie University. Before that in the UK at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, Bangor University, Wales and before that at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Emily’s research and study is just as international.
She has a BA from Pomona College, California, a MSc from University of Otago, a PhD from Dartmouth College, she was a Research Fellow at the University of California Santa Barbara and she completed postdoctoral training at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Germany).
During her seven-month New Zealand stay, Emily will be conducting a research project “looking at how we can build embodied and conversational social connections with robots,” with the project crossing into a number of research areas.
She will be hosted by Liz Broadbent whose area is psychological medicine – using artificial agents to help health outcomes. There’s Bruce McDonald a robotics professor, Mark Billinghurst who works in empathetic computing. Emily will lecture and do outreach events on facing people’s hopes and concerns around robots.
“All of my current research topics got their start when I was a Fulbright graduate student at Otago and I’m wildly excited to return to New Zealand. This is my fourth attempt to make coming to New Zealand happen!”
The common research theme for Emily is Neuroscience and at present she’s following not one but three strands: Human – robot interactions, arts – science intersections and human neuroscience work. She looks at how the human brain supports learning with and about other complex agents in our social world, with a particular focus on humans and robots.
Running in parallel with neuroscience research has been Emily’s passion for dance and fitness and these converge into her research. She is a trained ballet dancer and when she was at Otago, Emily joined the Dunedin dance company, Slightly Synthetic – a hip-hop contemporary dance group. Back in the US finishing her PhD Emily joined the Dartmouth Dance Company that performed around the US and then coincidentally came to New Zealand and toured.
On the fitness side Emily’s research brings in the body cognition and how our physical body interacts with the world.
“I’ve worked adjacent with sports science. What I think is interesting when I run with music it’s movement to music. So it doesn’t matter if it’s running or swimming, any exercise that makes you breathe is good for cognition. I swim outdoors all year in Zurich and go running. Seeing people face-to-face reminds us of our physicality.”
Emily has completed ten marathons including a third place in the 2009 Antarctica marathon and is already looking into half marathons that she can do in Auckland. She says it’s bringing back memories of her first half marathon that she ran in Queenstown, New Zealand.
There’s further New Zealand connections. Her children both have Māori middle names and she got married on a glacier in Mt Aspiring National Park.
“I’m excited to introduce the country to my whole family.”