Faculty Members and Postdoctoral Fellows

Eugene Kukshinov

Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business

Eugene is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Lennart E. Nacke. He focuses on media psychology research, including areas of presence and immersion studies, media psychology issues (such as media identity, and representation), and analysis of Russian hegemonic discourses. You should talk to Eugene if you want help with the conceptualization/categorization or design parts of your research projects or of you like ping pong, tabletop/video games, sports, and movies. Learn more about Eugene - eugenekukshinov.com.

Geneva Smith

Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business

Geneva is a postdoctoral fellow in the HCI Games Group and TouchLab. She received her Ph.D. in Software Engineering from McMaster in 2023, where she worked in the G-ScalE Lab in the Department of Computing and Software developing methods for acknowledging and limiting subjectivity in CME development to improve their reusability, maintainability, and verifiability. The core goal of her research, funded through the Provost's Program for Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Scholars, is to examine the relationship between the programmed system, user interaction, and a user's perception of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) to guide IDN development processes and tools for satisfying pro-social learning experiences. 

Kimi Ce Zhong

Cheriton School of Computer Science

Kimi is a postdoctoral fellow at the WatVis Lab at the University of Waterloo. Advised by Dr. Jian Zhao, his current research is to creatively utilize AI as a design material to physicalize digital sound data. He is doing this by conducting more-than-human-oriented studies in designing with the gathered (non)human things and deploying the physicalized thing to entangle the cohabited everyday (non)humans. Kimi received his Ph.D. degree from the Everyday Design Studio at Simon Fraser University. Advised by Dr. Ron Wakkary, Dr. Willams Odom, and Dr. Mikael Wiberg, the overarching goal of his doctoral study is to progressively develop shared qualities of shape-changing things through the lens of the Materiality of Interaction. To this end, he constructed three novel dynamic physical forms by designing with the gathered materials and tools at hand. With these resources, he collected rich new organic empirical data by conducting long-term field studies in everyday settings. The shared qualities are suddenness, versatileness, and creatureness, which explicitly extend former discussions on the affordances of shape changes in design and HCI. 

Before pursuing his research potential, Kimi worked at multinational corporations to improve people’s everyday lives by designing technological commercial products, which span from household appliances to medical devices to transportation equipment. These research-oriented design projects have won more than ten top-tier international design awards, which include the Red Dot Design Award: Best of the Best, iF Design Award, and International Design Excellent Award. Research Interests: Human-computer Interaction; Interaction Design; Industrial Design; Research through Design; More-than-Human Design; The Materiality of Interaction, AI; Data Physicalization; Temporality; Shape-Changing Interfaces; Everyday Design.

Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering

Omar is a researcher and term-defined professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on machine intelligence, human-computer/robot interaction, AI/ML-enabled robotic vision and control, autonomous systems, intelligent state estimation, multi-robot systems, 2D/3D SLAM, and haptics. With over a decade of experience at both Canadian and international institutions, he has made significant contributions to both industry and academia. His work includes the development of intelligent task allocation algorithms and nonlinear control techniques for multi-robot systems, as well as the application of AI/ML technologies to advance machine intelligence and robotic vision.

Learn more about Omar on his UW profile.

Reza Hadi Mogavi

Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business