Tesca Fitzgerald

Tesca Fitzgerald is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on interactive robot learning, enabling robots to adapt to novel situations through human-guided learning. She holds a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology (2020) and a B.S. from Portland State University.

Her research interests include cognitive robotics, human-robot interaction, transfer learning, and active learning. She emphasizes robots' ability to reason about novel objects, tasks, and interactions by leveraging human teachers' domain knowledge. Key areas include structuring human-robot interactions to meet learning goals and modeling training data derived from these interactions.

Notable honors include the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2014-2017), IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2017), and Georgia Tech GVU Center Foley Scholars Award (2017). Her work has been presented at top conferences like IJCAI, AAMAS, and HRI.

Fitzgerald’s research lab, the IQR Lab, explores inquiry-based methods for robot learning. Prior to Yale, she was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, collaborating with Henny Admoni, Reid Simmons, and Aaron Steinfeld. She has organized workshops on learning and interaction at IROS and served on conference committees, including HRI 2021.