Dr. Justine Cassell Professor, Communications Studies Professor, Education Frances Searle Building Room 2-148 2240 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-2952 Phone: (847) 491-3534 Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center Room 3-221 Sheridan Road, south of Technological Institute Evanston, IL 60208-0001

Justine Cassell (Ph.D., University of Chicago) has joined the department of Communication Studies, and the program in Media, Technology and Society, as professor. Cassell comes to Northwestern from the MIT Media Lab, where she headed the Gesture and Narrative Language research group. Cassell's research focuses on understanding natural forms of communication, and then creating technological tools for those forms of communication and linguistic expression to flourish in the digital world. In particular, she is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent, a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior. More recently Cassell has investigated the role that the ECA can play in children's lives, as support for learning language and literacy skills.

Research / Personal Website

School of Communication

Year		Degree		Institution
1991		PhD		University of Chicago
1986		MLitt		University of Edinburgh
1982		BA		Dartmouth College
1981		DEUG		Universite de Besancon

Department of Computer Science
Media, Technology and Society