Beth Phillips

Lab Principal Investigator

Principal Investigator

Elizabeth "Beth" Phillips is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition Group at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology from the University of Central Florida and completed her Post-Doctoral work in the Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative at Brown University. 

Her expertise is in human interactions with robots, autonomous systems, and related technologies like augmented and virtual reality. She studies how we can design these systems to be better partners and teammates for people in the near future. She has an interest in how robots and other technologies are changing the way we interact with the world and one another, including the future of human relationships. Her research background is diverse and interdisciplinary and includes collaborations with researchers in the departments of engineering and industrial design, computer science, cognitive science, and commercial product companies outside of the university. 

She is also the co-creator of the Anthropomorphic RoBOT (ABOT) database, a collection of images of and data about real-world human-like robots. ABOT was created as a resource to enable systematic, generalizable, and reproducible research on the psychological effects of robots’ human-like appearance.