Elizabeth Broadbent
NOMIS Senior Fellow
Organization
Collegium Helveticum
About Elizabeth Broadbent
Elizabeth Broadbent is a NOMIS–Collegium Helveticum Senior Fellow and a professor in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Broadbent received her PhD in health psychology from the University of Auckland in 2005, an MSc with first-class honors in health psychology from the University of Auckland in 2002, a Graduate Diploma in Arts in Psychology from Massey University, New Zealand, in 2000, and a BE with honors in electrical and electronic engineering from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1995.
Before her academic career, Broadbent worked as a researcher studying fatigue in international flight operations at Air New Zealand, a design engineer at Robotechnology, and a support engineer at TransPower. She later joined the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland, serving as associate professor from 2016 to 2018, senior lecturer from 2010 to 2015 and lecturer from 2005 to 2009 before becoming professor in the same department in 2019.
NOMIS–Collegium Helveticum Senior Fellowship period: September 1, 2026 – December 15, 2026
Research focus
Broadbent’s research focuses on patients’ perceptions of illness, human–robot interaction, embodied conversational agents, psychological interventions, social support, embodied cognition, and psychoneuroimmunology.
As a NOMIS Senior Fellow, Broadbent is studying one of the defining challenges of the 21st century: the way humans interact with machines. Humans are inherently social beings who form social networks integral to civilized society. When relationships are lacking, individuals experience loneliness, with negative impacts on mood, health and longevity. Broadbent’s fellowship project, Creating Socially Effective Connections with AI Agents, aims to further develop a conceptual model of social connectedness with AI agents, and to design multidisciplinary research to test the model and publish the results. The work will generate novel insights contributing to ethical guidelines for the use of AI to improve health and well-being and to build healthier societies.
Awards and recognition
Broadbent was elected Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi New Zealand and Fellow of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, US, in 2022. In 2017, she received a Fulbright Senior Award to study companion robots in Boston, US, and in 2010 held visiting scholar positions at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, both in Boston. She also received the Early Career Research Excellence Award from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 2008 and the Early Career Award from the International Congress of Behavioral Medicine in Germany in 2004.
