Faculty Members

Mark Hancock is the Associate Director of the Games Institute. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Management Sciences in the Faculty of Engineering, where he directs the Touchlab.

Dr. Aynur Kadir’s research focuses on practices and theories of design and the study of interactive multimedia in the humanities, ethnographic practices, and museum curation.

Ben’s background is in visual neuroscience and his research interests relate to the development and plasticity of human visual brain areas.

Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo.

Chrysanne Di Marco has been a member of the Artificial Intelligence Group since 1990. She is also project leader of the HealthDoc project, which works to develop natural language generation systems for producing multimedia health information tailored to medical conditions and patient characteristics.

Professor Kaplan studies the application of computer graphics in art, illustration, ornamentation, and design. This research area is rooted in computer graphics, but involves forays into art (to study historical sources) classical and computational geometry (to develop mathematical and computational models of ornament), and computer-aided design and manufacturing.

Edith Law is an Assistant Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on interaction techniques and incentive mechanisms for volunteer-based human computation systems, and how these systems can address problems in Science and Public Health. She is also part of the Human Computer Interaction Lab.

Gerald Voorhees is an Assistant Professor in the Department Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. His research is on games and new media as sites for the construction and contestation of identity and culture, and he has edited books on masculinities in games, feminism in play, role-playing games, and first-person shooter games.

Dr. Isabel Pedersen, Director of the Decimal Lab at UOIT and Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media, and Culture, studies the societal impact of human-computer interaction.

Jason Hawreliak received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Waterloo. His research examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality in videogames. Other research interests include multimodal rhetoric and the psychological function of digital media.

Jennifer Roberts-Smith is Director of the qCollaborative, the intersectional feminist design research lab housed at the Games Institute. Her research and creative work in performance and digital media focus on history, education, and social justice. At qLab, JRS leads the SSHRC-funded Design for Peace and Theatre for Relationality projects. She is also VR Creative Director and Virtual Reality Cluster Lead with the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project.

Dr. Jesse Hoey is an associate professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.   He is also an adjunct scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute in Toronto, Canada, where he is co-leader of the AI and Robotics Research Team.  Dr. Hoey received the B.Sc. degree (1992) in physics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, the M.Sc. degree (1995) in physics and the Ph.D degree (2004) in computer science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  From 2004-2010, he was an assistant professor  in the School of Computing at the University of Dundee, Scotland.    In 2014-2015 he was a visiting professor at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en automatique (INRIA) in Sophia-Antipolis, France.

Karen Collins' research is diverse and interdisciplinary, but has always had a central focus: the interaction of humans and machines, specifically as related to sound.

Kristina R. Llewellyn is the Principal Investigator of Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (www.dohr.ca): The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children History Education Initiative, a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Dr. Lennart Nacke is an Associate Professor, the Associate Director Graduate Studies for Stratford campus, and the Director of the HCI Games Group at the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute. Professor Nacke teaches User Experience, Human-Computer Interaction, and Game Design at the University of Waterloo.

In the research community, there has been a new direction of research on dexterous myoelectric control mimicking the neuromuscular system by extracting nature control information from surface EMG with advanced algorithm, and Ning Jiang is one of the world leading experts in this exciting direction.

Dr. Shi Cao studies human factors and ergonomics using both experiment and computational simulation methods.

Susan is a medical geographer with specific interests in global environmental health. She is an Adjunct Professor with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, a partner in much of the global water and sanitation research that she does. She is also a research lead for the AllerGen national centr