Faculty
Edward Melcer
Director
Eddie is an independent game developer and Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Media and Games and Playable Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. His primary teaching and research interests are at the intersection of games, human-computer interaction, and learning science where he explores the usage of alternative controllers, novel interfaces. and physical gameplay mechanics to enhance learning outcomes in educational games. He also does research in the area of game studies, conducting large-scale meta-analyses to better understand overall trends within game research and industry. Eddie’s serious games have won awards in venues such as the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge and Games for Learning Design Competition, and his independent games have been featured in a number of venues such as IndieCade, IndieCade East, and Come Out & Play.
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PhD Students
Marjorie Ann Cuerdo
Marj is a Ph.D. Computational Media student whose work spans across human-computer interaction and games. She uses games user research processes to research how game design for challenge affects player experience and reflective affective/social-emotional learning. Ever since Pokémon indirectly taught her English as a kid, she has loved games and technologies for encouraging us to imagine beyond our individual lenses of the world. She earned her M.S. Human-Computer Interaction from DePaul University and B.A. Digital Media Studies from University of Rochester. Marj loves going video game hopping, listening to music and UX and XR research podcasts, and watching the NBA (go Warriors). She proudly grew up in the Pacific island of Saipan.
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Samuel Shields
Samuel Shields (goes by Sam or Shieldsy) is a Ph.D. student in Computational Media with a B.S. in Computer Science and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. After his undergraduate degree, Sam worked a wide range of technology jobs: Full-Stack Developer, Developer Evangelist, Solutions Architect. Some time into his career, he found his love for Product Design and Production and worked professionally as a Senior Technical Product Manager in the Cyber Security space for a number of years. Throughout his entire education and career, Sam kept moonlighting building controllers, board games, and hardware experiments. After building out his skills creating scalable, stable, and secure applications, Sam decided to focus on his lifelong passion: learning about the power of video games and trying to design them. His research interests currently involve exploring novel game design methods leveraging Artificial Intelligence, highly-personalized controllers and control schemes, and embodied cognition in games. Sam’s core values are bringing people together and finding healing through games – he remembers fondly how his childhood neighborhood became networked through the cords and controllers of the Nintendo 64. In his spare time, Sam religiously rock climbs and practices Yoga, plays D&D, and plays the latest action-adventure games on his Switch.
Daeun Hwang
Daeun (or Dany) is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Media. Her research focuses on investigating the influence of gamification elements on players’ emotional and psychological aspects, as well as exploring their design implications. Moreover, she is deeply interested in enhancing the educational gaming experience for young players. Overall, her research encompasses various aspects of human-computer interaction. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Information and Interaction Design from Yonsei University. Her diverse professional background includes roles as a user experience researcher, project manager, marketer, business consultant, and more. Outside her academic pursuits, Daeun enjoys creating music, photography, video editing, and bouldering.
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Eunsol Choi
Sol is a first-year Computational Media PhD, working on pleasurable media experiences in daily life. She is interested in leveraging technology to provide ubiquitous sensory interactions, specifically in food and hedonic domains. Her ideas and interests center around dispersing hedonic elements often found from pleasurable activities such as console games. She can be found digging and listening to music and running around to experiment with alternative types of interactions
MS Students & Research Assistants
Andrew Dunne
Andrew Dunne (he/him) is a computational media master’s student figuring out what this whole research thing is about. His current interests are art, game development, and multimedia learning, and is currently exploring how people begin learning 3D modeling. His goal is to practice research and understand how it can be used to help those around him and the world at large.
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Bridget Ho
Bridget is an incoming M.S. student in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at UCSC and holds a B.S. in Psychology (and minors in Behavioral Neuroscience and Biology) from Northeastern University. Her initial career goal was to become a psychiatrist and provide culturally appropriate mental health care to patients. After exploring how technology can influence brain structure formation and change social behaviors, Bridget became interested in developing technology that can support healthy brain functioning and meaningful relationships. She was inspired by the positive impact that technology can have in forming and maintaining strong communities. Now, her goal is to become an Interaction Designer and Researcher that creates engaging interactions both on and offline. Outside of work and school, Bridget enjoys reading short stories and novels, baking (mostly yeasted breads), and playing visual novel games.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Anika Mahajan
Anika is a fourth-year student pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science: Game Design and a minor in Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest in research are anything involving human-computer interactions and games, especially with player experience and player immersion. She helped with the UI/UX design on a game studying social identity threat and currently researching failure in games. In her freetime, she likes reading, cuddling with her dogs, watercoloring, and playing narrative games.
Ramon Rubio
Ramon is currently a fourth-year student pursuing a degree in Network and Digital Technology at University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests lie in the design elements and 3D printing. At the moment, he is working on creating an educational game that will not only teach people the fundamentals of programming and problem-solving, but also put their creative skills to the test by using the 3D printer. Ramon’s skills lie in creative thinking, problem-solving, and illustration and basic programming. In his own time he loves to draw, watch sports, hear music with friends and video editing.
Alumni
Postdoctoral Fellows
Katelyn Grasse
Katy is a clinical research engineer and an aspiring game developer who joined the ALT Games Lab in 2019. She earned a B.S. in Applied Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her primary research interest is to develop and test engaging closed-loop technologies that measure and enhance brain functions. Her previous R&D experience includes human and animal projects focused on neural interfaces and rehabilitation automation. In addition to building things, Katy enjoys dabbling in the visual arts, reading science fiction, hiking, learning about random stuff on The Internet and playing most any kind of video game, so long as it’s awesome.
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PhD Students
Oleksandra “Saya” Keehl
Saya was born and raised in Mariupol, Ukraine, and moved to the US in 2001. Her tech career so far consists of two years of undergraduate courses from Cogswell college followed by 2.5 years as a UI software engineer at TiVo. In order to fulfill her dual nature of an artist and an engineer, she chose to pursue her graduate degree at UCSC, which is known for its interdisciplinary projects. Saya is currently enrolled in the UCSC Computational Media PhD program. Her two areas of research are Artificial Intelligence and its application in video games; and using scientific methods to develop effective educational games for learning kanji (this interest harkens back to Saya’s BA in Japanese language and her personal struggles with kanji). Saya was an AI Research intern at the Electronic Arts in the summer 2018. She has also secured an AI Research internship at Unity Technologies for the summer of 2019. She hopes to graduate within 2-3 years.
MS Students & Research Assistants
Derusha Baskaran
Derusha is a 2nd-year M.S. student in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of San Francisco. She enjoys both the creative and analytical aspects of HCI and wants to contribute to the user experience (UX) of various technologies through UX research and design. Derusha has always been intrigued by technology of all kinds and is inspired by the growth and impact it can have on communities and vice versa. That is why she aims to be a UX Researcher and Designer who can help make people’s lives a bit easier and better at the end of the day, as it enables her to pursue both her passion and interests in technology and communities. Ever since elementary school, Derusha has been (and will always be) a videogame aficionado! While she enjoys playing and watching any type of video game, she does have a particular fondness for those with intricate narratives, world-building/lore, and characters. Some of her favorite games/series are: Pokemon (Silver!), Jak and Daxter, Assassins Creed, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Yakuza. When taking a break from screens, Derusha loves to cook/bake, go for hikes/walks in parks, and talk about documentaries on random topics.
Marina Castellanos
Max Cronce
John Dominic Sanchez Diez
John earned an M.S. from the Department of Computational Media. He received his B.S. in Social Psychology with a minor in Mathematics with Honors at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are focused on using intersections between the fields of social sciences, engineering, and the Arts/Humanities to answer questions about gaming, technology, and the communities created by it. His primary research goals are to bring together interdisciplinary groups to solve social problems regarding tech literacy ranging from understanding internet cookies to parsing out fake news and misinformation. Currently, he is working on CookieMania an interactive serious game designed to teach high school/college students about internet cookies and its social implications as well as conducting experiments on how people fall for fake news online. John’s past research work in undergrad has been in moral development, learning through online media, conformity online, and gamer aggression. John’s hobbies involve playing clarinet, singing, tabletop games, D&D, competitive video games, RPG games, and most importantly sleeping.
Fatyma Camacho
Fatyma is a Latinx forward-thinking Game Designer/3D Artist with a master degree from UCSC in Games and Playable Media passionate about diverse narratives, inclusive characters, and unique game mechanics. She’s collaborated as an artist in several major Universities for educational and assessment games such as Stanford, the University of Arkansas Medical School and Howard University. She’s currently a game system designer for Stemlins EDU in their game Mathstronauts, that blends gameplay with 1st – 5th grade foundational math skills. (https://mathstronaut.com/).
Delong Du
Delong received his MS in Games and Playable Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2021, and his BIS in Digital Media Collaboration from the University of Cincinnati in 2019 graduated Summa Cum Laude. During his studies at UC Santa Cruz, he developed a VR game, Spellcasters, for physical therapy with a team of fellow classmates, PhD students, and physical therapists. In addition, Delong worked with Professor Benjamin Britton at University of Cincinnati to restore his VR art installation about the ancient painted French Cave Lascaux, which was exhibited at Innoventions, Epcot Center, Disney World, Kwang-ju Biennale, Korea, and Galerie Le Monde de l’Art, Paris. Currently, Delong is working on researches about players’ empathic experiences.
Yulin Cai
Yulin was a grad student of the Serious Games program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She joined the ALT Games Lab in 2019. She received her B.S. in Architecture from Xiamen University in China and worked as an architect before she came to UCSC. She has a passion for user experience design as well as illustration. She worked on a surgical training game project in collaboration with Stanford School of Medicine. She is the UX/UI designer and environment artist in the team.
Janelynn Camingue
Janelynn earned her M.S Games and Playable Media at the University of California-Santa Cruz. She also earned her B.S in Computer Science: Computer Game Design from University of California-Santa Cruz, where she also worked on It’s Alive. She has interned two summers at 21st Century Fox, and helped create an AR experience for the company. She joined the ALT Games lab in 2019 and with focus on visual novels. Janelynn has published a taxonomy of educational visual novels, in the Foundations of Digital Games conference 2020. She plans to revolutionize educational games and visual novels as a research scientist in games. In her free time, she likes to spend time with her dog Cutiepie, and read visual novels.
Ayesha Khalid
Ruonan Chen
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Rhea Sharma
Vivian Pham
Vivian was a student pursuing a degree in Art and Design: Games and Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests lie in the design elements, player immersion, and imaginative impact of interactive media types. At the moment, she is collecting and analyzing data in relation to the design themes and development of games featured in various major independent game festivals and showcases. Vivian’s skills lie in illustration, concept art, and graphic design. In her own time, she loves zine freelancing, fashion thrifting, dancing, and role playing video games.