Catholijn Jonker (1967) is a full professor of Interactive Intelligence at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science at Delft University of Technology. She studied computer science and completed her PhD at Utrecht University. After a postdoctoral position in Bern, Switzerland, she became an assistant professor (later associate professor) in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
From September 2004 to September 2006, she was a full professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the Nijmegen Institute of Cognition and Information at Radboud University Nijmegen. She chaired De Jonge Akademie (Young Academy) of the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) in 2005 and 2006, and was a member from 2005 to 2010. She is a member of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and the Academia Europaea. From September 2013 to January 2016, she served as president of the National Network of Female Professors (LNVH) in the Netherlands. She was interim head of the Design Engineering Department at TU Delft for one year (2014/2015).
Catholijn has been an EurAI Fellow since 2015 and a EurAI board member since 2016. EurAI is the European Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Her publications address cognitive processes and concepts such as negotiation, teamwork, and the dynamics of individual agents and organizations. In all her research, Catholijn adopts a value-sensitive approach. In particular, she works towards developing intelligent agents that can interact with users in value-conflicting situations, even when meta-values no longer provide a solution. At Delft, she leads an interdisciplinary team to create synergy between humans and technology by understanding, shaping, and applying the fundamentals of intelligence and interaction.
At the end of 2007, her NWO-STW €1.5 million VICI project “Pocket Negotiator” was awarded. In this project, she develops intelligent decision support systems for negotiation.