Zhao Han

Zhao Han (he/him) is a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.

Thanks to his Ph.D. advisor and postdoc mentor, Dr. Han has been actively mentoring 17 undergraduate researchers. He has really enjoyed the mentorship, passing on his experience and providing resources. Among them, seven are underrepresented and eight are females: Dr. Han strives to makes the research environment more accessible, equal, and inclusive. Five of them have published six refereed papers, the culmination of effective understanding of research methodology, which is to design robot interactions and evaluate them through empirical methods in human-robot interaction.

In addition to human-robot interaction, Dr. Han’s research also lies broadly in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and augmented reality (AR). More specifically, he focuses on designing and studying novel robotic systems and interactions, for embodied robots being more capable in human environments and more understandable while interacting with humans.

Dr. Han is an award-winning researcher, leading teams to win multiple robot competitions: first place in the Panasonic Prototype 3D LiDAR Challenge, second place in the FetchIt Mobile Manipulation Challenge at ICRA 2019, and a finalist in the Analog Devices (ADI) Real-Time Sensor Fusion Challenge. He has recently won the best late-breaking report third prize at HRI 2022.

Service is important and beneficial to academic life. He co-organizes and is a General Co-Chair of the 2022 AI-HRI symposium. He is also actively involved in HRI standardization and more (see CV). At Mines, Dr. Zhao Han founded the Mines Asian Community Alliance and is a founding officer of Mines’ office of postdoctoral affairs. He believes in STEM outreach to broaden participation and involve under-represented, under-resourced communities.

Dr. Han received his Ph.D. (2021) in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the Human-Robot Interaction Lab, directed by AAAI Fellow Dr. Holly Yanco. Previously, he received his M.S. (advised by Dr. Carson Leung in the Database and Data Mining Lab) and B.S. degrees in Computer Science at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

To learn more about Dr. Han and his work, please visit his personal website.