De’Aira G. Bryant, Ph.D.

De’Aira Bryant has spent two years as a postdoctoral scientist at Amazon on their Consumer Robotics and Fauna Robotics teams. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked as a graduate research assistant in the Human Automation Systems (HumAnS) Lab under the mentorship and advisory of Dr. Ayanna Howard. Her research areas include Human-Robot Interaction, Affective Computing, and AI Ethics. De’Aira also holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics from the University of South Carolina (UofSC). She was a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the GEM National Consortium Fellowship, the Georgia Tech Sloan M.PhD Fellowship, and the Amazon Consumer Robotics Fellowship.

De’Aira has accumulated practical research experience in academia and in industry. She has worked for Amazon as a Research Scientist Intern on the Rekognition, Themis, and Consumer Robotics teams in four consecutive summer internships. She also previously worked for Adobe Design Research as an Experience Design intern.

Her longstanding passion for teaching is also evident in the roles she has pursued. De’Aira was the head graduate teaching assistant under Dr. Ayanna Howard for the AI, Ethics, and Society course at Georgia Tech. She also served as a part-time computer science instructor for Juni Learning, teaching weekly Scratch, Python, and Java programming classes. She often leads workshops and outreach events to further share the possibilities of computing with others.

De’Aira is a native of Estill, South Carolina, and a Lowcountry girl at heart. She enjoys cookouts with her family, traveling the world, and sharing her experiences in computing and robotics with others.