Sandra Andrade is a passionate and highly skilled Informatics Engineer with a robust academic background and a strong focus on cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence (AI), human-robot interaction (HRI), and systems development. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Informatics Engineering from the University of Aveiro in 2020. Motivated by a strong interest in intelligent systems and robotics, Sandra completed a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in 2023. Her thesis, supervised by Dr.Filipa Correia and Dr.Ana Paiva, “Play The Mind Game with a Robot”, examined human–robot collaboration, focusing on how a robot’s gaze behavior influences team coordination. The project involved developing a complex system for gaze-based interaction and conducting a user study. Her work culminated in a poster presentation and pitch at the LARSyS Annual Meeting in July 2023. Building on her thesis, Sandra was awarded a research grant under the international Center for Responsible AI project (ref. C628696807-00454142) at GAIPS/INESC-ID. Over the past two years (initially as a researcher and then as a PhD student), under the guidance of Dr.Joana Campos and Dr.Correia, she expanded her Master's research by enhancing gaze-recognition modules with state-of-the-art methods, collecting new data, and have submitted a full paper, "Real-Time Robotic Gaze in Multiparty Teamwork: Attention Signaling vs Attention Responsiveness," which is currently under review at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 conference. Additionally, Sandra is involved in a collaborative project with Carnegie Mellon University. Working alongside Dr.Hirokazu Shirado, Dr.Campos, and Dr.Correia, she explores how robotic attention mechanisms impact team cooperation. This interdisciplinary research establishes a complex system integrating AI, HRI, and cognitive and behavioral sciences. Its objective is to balance the semantic and social attention dynamics within a human-robot team. The insights derived from this work are being developed into two full papers: one focusing on the system and one on the user study. She was also invited to the podcast “Quatro à Conversa” by Expresso (a nationally relevant newspaper), as a robotics engineer. The robot “Lupa” participates in the podcast, and Sandra developed the autonomous system that enables the robot to display non-verbal behaviours during conversations. In February, she was awarded a research grant for the ERROR-MM project (10.54499/2024.14234.CMU) at ITI/LARSyS, supervised by Dr.Correia. She contributes to research on how robot-like behaviors influence users’ mental models of robots, further exploring nonverbal robot behavior and various robot embodiments. Through this project, she had a short paper accepted and presented it as the first author at the “Designing Transparent and Understandable Robots” Workshop at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2026 (HRI'26), a CORE A* conference. Sandra also contributes to the international scientific community as a student volunteer, having participated in the IEEE Conference on Games 2025, the HRI'26, and science outreach events hosted by IST. She was also selected to attend the Spring School on Machine Learning and Perception for Social Awareness organized by the SWEET project consortium (Social aWareness for sErvicE roboTs – Marie Sklodowska-Curie Industrial Doctoral Network), taking place in Italy in April 2026.