Faculty Members

Executive Director of The Games Institute

In addition to directing The Games Institute, Neil Randall has also earned large grants for The Interactive and Multi-Modal Research Syndicate (IMMERSe) and the Waterloo Game Analysis and Monitoring Environment (WatGAME). He is the Faculty Advisor to the Games Institute's First Person Scholar. 

Professor Mehlenbacher is an Ontario Early Researcher Award holder who specializes in science communication, citizen science, and expertise in multidisciplinary teams. 

Dr. Ben Feng’s research interests include mathematical modelling of complex real-life systems, computer experiment design and analysis, and Monte Carlo simulations.

Dr. Feng is particularly interested in the intersections of these fields such as experiment designs, statistical analysis of computer simulations, efficient simulation procedures for risk management, etc. While with a methodological emphasis, Dr. Feng is very keen on conducting research that can make an impact in practical applications.

Beth Coleman is co-director of the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo, and participates in the Rhetoric & Professional Writing major as well as the Master of Arts in Experimental Digital Media.

Brianna Wiens is a Lecturer in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, Co-Convener of the Q Collaborative, and a Doctoral Candidate in the joint program in Communication and Culture at York University with Ryerson University. Her research explores and applies intersectional feminist philosophy and practice as a form of techné to consider potentials of queer and feminist technologies for digital activisms.

Colin Ellard is a psychologist researching neuroscience. ​​His interests include how the organization and appearance of natural and built spaces affects movement, wayfinding, emotion, and physiology. He directs the Urban Realities Lab at the University of Waterloo.

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.

Ken Hirschkop is currently a part of the Games and Narrative Reading Group at the Games Institute. With Dr. Hirschkop's guidance, graduate students who join the reading group explore how the fields of Narrative Theory and Game Studies intersect and inform one another.

"I was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised near Boston. My original academic speciality was music theory and history, but in 1981, after a brief stint as an apprentice harpsichord maker, I went to England to do graduate work in literature. There, largely by chance, I decided to write my doctorate on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, focusing on his theory of language. At the University of Southampton, where I worked from 1987 until 1995, I had the rather grandiose title of Lecturer in the History and Theory of Communication, a title I did my best to live up to, by offering courses that covered a wide sphere of issues in communication, past and present. From 1995 until 2005 I worked at the University of Manchester, where I ran and taught an MA programme in Cultural Criticism. In the summer of 2005 I moved to Waterloo."

- Ken

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.

Leah teaches User Experience Design and Innovation at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford Campus. She joined Waterloo from an interdisciplinary background, bridging design and research from computer science, human-computer interaction, and graphic design. She has four years of industry experience working as a designer.

Dr. Michael Barnett-Cowan is an Associate Professor for the Kinesiology Department, Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, 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.

Randy Allen Harris is a rhetorician with the University of Waterloo’s Department of English Language and Literature. His interests include Computational Rhetoric, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Stylistics. His books include The Linguistic Wars, Rhetoric and Incommensurability, and Voice Interaction Design. He is the director of RhetFig, a rhetorical-figure research group that developed GoFigure, a citizen-science game for harvesting rhetorical figures from any and all genres, registers, and discourses.  

Stacey’s research and teaching interests are human-computer interaction and computer-supported collaboration.

Muhammad Umair Shah is a faculty member in the Department of Management Sciences, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He pursues research in human-computer interaction, application of stakeholder theory in technology realm, and ethics of UX design.

He investigates the impacts of various emotional and sensory factors on usage patterns of multiplayer online battle arena games. He is also interested in learning about the intentions that alter usage behaviour and advertising value of mobile video games.