The Games Institute acknowledges that we are living and working on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (also known as Neutral), Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.
Michael Barnett-Cowan
Michael Barnett-Cowan is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences. As a cognitive and systems neuroscientist with a proven track record of investigating how multisensory information impacts spatial and temporal perception, decision-making, and human movement, Dr. Barnett-Cowan collaborates extensively with many members of the Games Institute.
Shi Cao
Shi Cao is pronounced like SHER TSAO. Dr. Cao’s major research area is human factors engineering. His research projects include human performance and workload modeling, human-machine system reliability, and the applications of virtual and augmented reality. He has developed cognitive models and human performance simulation systems that can be used to model and predict human performance and other human factors constructs in various work domains such as transportation and human-computer interaction.
Beth Coleman
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.
Karen Collins*
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.
Vic Diciccio*
Professor DiCiccio helped found the Institute for Computer Research (ICR).
Colin Ellard
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.
Mark Hancock
Mark Hancock is the Associate Director of the Games Institute. He is also a professor in the Department of Management Sciences in the Faculty of Engineering, where he directs the Touchlab.
Craig S. Kaplan
Craig 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
Edith Law is an Associate Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at University of Waterloo, and co-directs the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Previously, She was a CRCS postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters in Computer Science from McGill University and a B.Sc in Computer Science from University of British Columbia. She is broadly interested in social computing technology that coordinates small groups to large crowds, new models of interactions with machine intelligence, and how technology can be designed to foster and celebrate certain human values. The research conducted by Law and her students have received several best paper awards and honorable mentions at the CHI and CSCW conference. Law's work is funded by NSERC Discovery Grant, NSERC-CIHR Collaborative Health Research Project (CHRP) as well as the CFI-JELF program. A full list of publications is available in the CV and Google Scholar.
Fue-Sang Lien
Fue-Sang Lien is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering. Professor Lien is also the Head of Waterloo CFD Engineering Consulting Inc.
Chrysanne Di Marco
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.
Ian Milligan
Ian Milligan is Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight and Analysis at the University of Waterloo, where he is also a professor of history. Milligan’s primary research focus is on how historians can use web archives, as well as the impact of digital sources on historical practice more generally.
Neil Randall
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.
Jennifer Roberts-Smith
Jennifer Roberts-Smith's transdisciplinary, design-based work in performance and digital media focuses on history, education, and social justice. She is currently a co-director of the qCollaborative (the critical feminist design research lab housed in Games Institute) and directs the Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs project. She is also creative director and virtual reality cluster lead for the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project. Her recent publications have focused on methods for design research that deepen interdisciplinary understanding and take a relational approach to design.
Stacey Scott
Stacey Scott's research and teaching interests are human-computer interaction and emerging technology design.
Gerald Voorhees
Gerald Voorhees is an Associate Professor in the Department Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.
Jim Wallace
Jim Wallace is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Health Sciences at University of Waterloo. He leads the HCI and Health lab, with research addressing how technologies like large, interactive displays, smart devices, and machine learning can prevent disease, prolong life, and promote human health.
Jennifer Whitson
Jennifer R. Whitson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Legal Studies and at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, both at the University of Waterloo.
Brian Cullen
Brian graduated in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design Dublin in 2000 where his interests included video and sound installation. He received an M.Phil in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin in 2004 focusing on audio-visual composition.
Guillaume Becasier
Guillaume Besacier was a post-doctoral fellow in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). During his Ph.D. at the Université Paris-Sud (France), supervised by Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Frédéric Vernier, he worked with interactive tabletop computers and designed new interaction techniques to use a tabletop more effectively and easily, while being compatible with existing WIMP interfaces.
Kristina Llewellyn
Kristina R. Llewellyn is Full Professor of Social Development Studies and affiliated faculty with the Department of History. Her primary research area is oral history and education, which extends to the role of games and virtual reality in teaching and learning history.
Jason Hawreliak *
Jason Hawreliak is an Associate Professor at Brock Unviersity in the Department of Digital Humanities. His research examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality in videogames. Other research interests include multimodal rhetoric and the psychological function of digital media. He is the Faculty Advisor to the Games Institute's First Person Scholar.
Leah Zhang-Kennedy
Leah Zhang-Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in interaction design and user experience research, a member of the Games Institute and the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. Leah's research aims to understand and improve people’s digital experiences, knowledge, and technology practices, with particular focuses on computer security, online privacy, and digital literacy. She directs the Safe Interactions Lab at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, University of Waterloo.
Jesse Hoey
Jesse Hoey is a professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he leads the Computational Health Informatics Laboratory (CHIL). He is a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute, and an affiliate scientist at KITE/TRI, both in Toronto. Dr. Hoey holds a Ph.D degree (2004) in computer science from the University of British Columbia. He has published over one hundred peer reviewed scientific papers. He is Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and an Area Chair for the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023).
Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson's background is in visual neuroscience and his research interests relate to the development and plasticity of human visual brain areas.