Dr Chapa Sirithunge, Dr Yue Xie and Narges Khadem Hosseini, attended the Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network (GLOBALWIIN) event which brought together leading female innovators, funders, and researchers from around the globe focusing on sustainability, responsible innovation, and inclusivity in technology.
This was an exciting opportunity to showcase world-leading research from the University of Cambridge and to inspire future innovators by presenting robotics as an accessible and inclusive field.
At the event Chapa, Yue and Narges facilitated a workshop titled “Enhancing Women’s Participation in Robotics,” highlighting the importance of increasing female representation in the field—a sector where women currently make up less than 20%. The workshop, organised under the Cambridge Women-in-Robotics Network, provided an opportunity for attendees to interact with the robots developed at the University of Cambridge.
During the workshop, they showcased their cutting-edge medical robotic simulator, “RoboPatient.” Developed to support doctors in the diagnosis process, RoboPatient demonstrates how robotics can aid in medical training and reduce diagnostic biases.
Chapa explains "Robopatient is a medical robotic simulator which investigates how human participants use haptic exploration behaviours to detect abnormalities in a soft tissue given palpation force constraints. Research around this platform focuses on training medical students to perform physical examinations on patients under constraints imposed by pain expressions conditioned by different gender and culture backgrounds. Robopatient is currently capable of generating "pain" based on pain expressions such as facial expressions and pain sound based on palpation during diagnosis."
This was an exciting opportunity to showcase world-leading research from the University of Cambridge and to inspire future innovators by presenting robotics as an accessible and inclusive field. 
Chapa Sirithunge and Yue Xie and participant engaging with the medical robotic simulator “RoboPatient” Credit: Grace Moronfolu.
Chapa, Yue and Narges look forward to hosting similar events to further promote female participation and leadership in robotics. They recently launched a Women-in-Robotics Support Network aimed at encouraging women to pursue careers in robotics and supporting female researchers to advance within the field.
Their first event, a workshop held during the Agriforwards CDT Conference 2024 at the University of East Anglia, marked an exciting beginning for the initiative. The workshop featured Bola Olabisi, founder of GLOBALWIIN, as the keynote speaker. She was impressed by their robotic demonstrations showcased during the event and invited the team to host the session at the GLOBALWIIN Conference, recognising them as leading female researchers in robotics.
Narges Khadem Hosseini is a control engineer and manager of the Observatory for Human-Machine Collaboration laboratory which is a robotic lab at the University of Cambridge. She provides technical support to Agriforwards CDT and Observatory for Human Machine Collaboration students.
Dr Chapa Sirithunge is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with the Bio-inspired Robotics Lab and Future Roads Program at University of Cambridge. She received her bachelors and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. During her PhD, she developed cognitive frameworks for socially interactive robots in domestic and social domains. In 2023 she won the prestigious Marie Curie FutureRoads fellowship to continue her research in Robotics in a Civil Engineering domain to improve roads in the future. She further develops simulations to represent situation-aware human-machine collaborative systems in this context. Her research interests include bio-inspired robots, cognitive robotics, soft robots, and collaborative AI.
Dr Yue Xie is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow in the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory specialising in AI and Multi-Agent Systems for future road automation. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Adelaide in 2021 and has experience as a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO and the University of Adelaide. Her research spans AI, bio-inspired optimisation, mining engineering, public health, and soft robotics. With over 15 peer-reviewed papers, she actively contributes as a reviewer and guest editor for international journals. Her current focus is on integrating AI and information theory for vehicle-road coordination.
The researchers are supported by the EU-funded project FUTUREROADS (Grant Agreement No. 101034337) under the H2020-MSCA-COFUND-2020 program as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellows.
