Rate My Professor Nadia Berthouze

Professor Nadia Berthouze is Professor of Affective Interaction and Computing in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and a member of the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC). She was appointed Director of UCLIC in 2025, having previously served as Deputy Director and Acting Director since 2009. Internationally recognised as a pioneer in the field of Affective Computing, her research bridges Computer Science and Psychology, with specializations in affective computing, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, emotion recognition from body posture and movement, pain detection, and applications to health and wellbeing such as promoting physical activity through multisensory feedback. She has led the development of resources like the EmoPain dataset for multimodal pain recognition.

Berthouze has secured over £20 million in research funding from UKRI, the European Union, and major industrial partners including Bentley and NTT. Her leadership and mentorship have fostered significant talent development, with numerous former PhD students advancing to academic positions worldwide, including two professors at UCLIC. Her scholarly impact is evidenced by more than 12,700 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications include 'Cross-Cultural Differences in Recognizing Affect from Body Posture' (2006, Interacting with Computers), 'Automatic Detection of Chronic Pain-Related Expression: Multimodal Computational Framework' (2018), 'Changing Body Perception with Sound to Support Physical Activity for Health' (CHI 2019), and 'Altering Body Perception and Emotion in Physically Inactive People through Movement Sonification' (2020). She contributes to teaching master's-level courses on HCI with Ergonomics at UCLIC and has delivered guest lectures on sensing bodies to support care in affective computing for health. Berthouze maintains an active presence in professional activities within her field.