Dr. Anna Ciaunica is Principal Investigator at the Centre for Philosophy of Science and Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal; and Research Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, the UK. Before that, she was Research Associate at the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She obtained her PhD from the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France.

Anna is currently the Lead Investigator on three interdisciplinary projects exploring the relationship between self-consciousness, embodiment, and social interactions in humans and artificial agents.

In her work, Anna combines conceptual and empirical tools using psychophysiological, behavioral, and neural measures from experimental psychology, social neuroscience, Virtual Reality, and robotics to advance our understanding of the fundamental question: ‘What is self-consciousness?’ in humans, and how can we implement it in artificial agents.

She is also the coordinator of the Network for Embodied Consciousness, Technology, and the Arts (NECTArs) – a collaborative platform bringing together artists, researchers, stakeholders, policymakers, and people with lived experiences. NECTArs aims to foster creative solutions to timely questions such as self-consciousness and (dis)embodiment in our hyper-digitalized and hyper-connected world.