Faculty & Students
Katherine Isbister
Director
Katherine Isbister, Director. Katherine Isbister is a full professor in the University of California, Santa Cruz's Department of Computational Media, where she directs the Social Emotional Technology Lab, and the Center for Computational Experience. She has a Research through Design practice at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Games/Play, focused on interactive experiences that heighten social and emotional connections and wellbeing. She is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, and has shown games and playful experiences at IndieCade (Yamove! and SceneSampler), as well as at museums including the San Francisco Exploratorium and the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. Her most recent book from MIT Press is How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, winner of an American Library Association award. Isbister is a recipient of MIT Technology Review's Young Innovator Award, and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
Personal page: http://www.katherineinterface.com
Email: katherine.isbister@ucsc.edu
Postdocs
Linda Hirsch
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Linda Hirsch is a postdoctoral fellow at the SET lab and is working on the intersection of playful technological intervention and local communities’ climate resilience. Her research focuses on flooding risks in this broad range of natural hazards, including heavy rainfalls, coastal flooding, and precipitation. She holds a doctorial degree Magna cum Laude from the LMU Munich in Germany, where she explored and developed the design concept <i>Traces in Use</i> for meaningful human-environment interaction. She is also an elected executive committee member of the German group “Be-greifbare Interaktion” since 2021, an expert research group within the German Society of Information Technology regarding topics for tangible and embedded interfaces.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-linda-hirsch-88ba9413a/
Email: uxresearch@hirschlinda.com
PhDs
James Fey
Ph.D. Candidate
James Fey is a current Computational Media Ph.D. student and thought leader that has been a member of the SETLab since 2016. While completing his BS in Computer Science: Computer Game Design, he worked on various branches of the Social Wearables Project exploring applications of wearable technology in serious and game-based social settings. Since becoming a graduate student, he has continued working on social wearables along with expanding his research into maker kits and DIY learning. He is a frequent collaborator on hardware projects in the SETlab and in 2019 he was a visiting researcher in the interaction lab at the Univeristy of Saskatchewan. Email:jfey@ucsc.edu
Samir Ghosh
Ph.D. Student
Samir Ghosh, Ph.D. student. Samir Ghosh is a computational media PhD student focusing on multi-user and networked VR/AR applications, especially those with societal impact. Their interests include WebXR based development, open source, and creative code. Previously they were the Assistant Director at the Ahmanson Lab at USC, where they managed a makerspace, produced a wide array of interdisciplinary VR and AR projects, and taught practical workshops concerning generative art and rapid prototyping. They hold a BS in Computational Linguistics and a BA in Cognitive Science from USC. Email: sghosh17@ucsc.edu
Alumni
Anthony Angeles
Ferran Altarriba Bertran
Suzanne B. da Camara
Peter Cottrell
Ella Dagan
Jared Duval
Sean Fernandes
Sabrina Fielder
Muskan Gupta
Chen Ji
Victor Jialang Li
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
Pardis Miri
Andrew Moshkovich
Anya Osborne
Alexandra Pometko
Raquel Robinson
Elena Márquez Segura
Samantha Wang
Jimmy Zhou