I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 2013 from the University of Indonesia. I had been working in the software development industry for several years during and after my bachelor’s degree until 2015 when I started my master’s study in Human Media Interaction at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. For my master thesis, I created a question-generation system that can process text as the input and produce relevant question & answer pairs as the output. These question & answer pairs can be used to provide virtual humans with the knowledge to answer people’s questions. I received my master’s degree in Science in 2017.

In 2018, I started to work at the Comparative Psychology & Affective Neuroscience (CoPAN) lab at the Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University as a research assistant in the project “emotion mimicry in high & low socially anxious individuals” with Dr. Mariska Kret and Dr. Esther van den Bos as my supervisors. The project makes use of virtual humans to study the effect of social anxiety in mimicry and trust. In 2020, I started my PhD programme with the topic “virtual exposure training program for public speaking anxiety”, a project in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Dirk Heylen from the Human Media Interaction department at the University of Twente. This PhD project aims to create a virtual exposure training program that can reduce anxiety during public speaking by taking into account social decision-making capacities and the perception of emotional expressions.