Faculty profiles

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gerald Voorhees is an Associate Professor in the Department Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.

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.

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. 

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. 

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).