Katrin Fischer is a human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI) researcher currently writing her doctoral dissertation on social robot usability, for which she was awarded the USC Annenberg Endowed Dissertation Fellowship.

Her research explores the cognitive, social, and technology-based processes that affect expectations and decision-making when humans interact with embodied artificial intelligence systems. She uses experimental and data science methods to investigate how users perceive and experience emerging technologies-analyzing behavior, identifying and predicting key variables of technology use, and addressing challenges faced by diverse user groups. Her research is interdisciplinary, and she collaborates with the Interaction Lab at USC Viterbi.

She holds a master's degree in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University and was a visiting researcher in the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) at the University of Waterloo. Prior to that, she spent several years working in human factors engineering at Apple, focusing on user experience research. 

She has presented her work at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), the International Communication Association (ICA), and the National Communication Association (NCA). Her work has been published in peer-reviewed conference proceedings and journals, including the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, the International Journal of Communication, and Computers in Human Behavior.