Meet HFI’s Fall 2025 Intern, Gabriela Garcia
Gabriela García is originally from Peru, where she developed an early interest in mathematics and technology. Encouraged by her grandfather, who gave her her first computer, she began exploring how it worked and later enrolled in a computer hardware course at the age of twelve. This curiosity led her to study electrical engineering for her undergraduate degree, during which she discovered biomedical engineering and became fascinated by combining electronics with applications that could improve people’s lives.
After completing her studies in Peru, García moved to Germany to pursue a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. As part of her master’s program, she wrote her thesis together with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on ingestible electronic devices. These experiences reinforced her research interests and motivated her to pursue a Ph.D She is currently a research assistant and Ph.D. candidate at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, specifically at the Institute for Factory Automation and Production Systems (FAPS), where she focuses on social and humanoid robotics.
García is spending the Fall 2025 semester at the SaPHaRI (Social and Physical Human-Robot Interaction) Lab at Case Western Reserve University. She was drawn to Dr. Block’s lab and the Human Fusions Institute for their focus on understanding human psychology and translating it into technology. During her time in Cleveland, she will use HFI’s new motion capture system for a SaPHaRI Lab experiment on human-human interaction and work with Dr. Block on a project exploring expressive robots. Looking ahead, she hopes to continue her academic career and eventually establish her own research group in the field of social robotics.
