Dr. Zerrin Yumak is a professor of computer science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research is about virtual human technology: animation of virtual humans and social interactions with them. She published several papers on the topic of data-driven methods for non-verbal behavior synthesis using motion capture data, multi-party interaction and emotion and memory modelling. She obtained her PhD from University of Geneva, Switzerland. She did her post-doc at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She has been the Associate Editor of Visual Computer and Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds journals and she is the program committee member of several conferences such as SCA (Symposium on Computer Animation) and AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems). She co-organizes the IEEE MARCH (Modeling and Animating Realistic Crowds and Humans) and GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) workshops. She is the scientific director of the Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab at Utrecht University and co-organizer of the Embodied AI initiative.