Faculty & Staff

I compose, perform, record, mix and produce electroacoustic music; I am interested in how we can use the tools and techniques of audio production to explore new musical territory. I build mechatronic and robotic musical instruments; I am interested in how we can free electronic music from the world of speakers through computer-controlled automatic mechanical instruments. I conduct research and experiments that explore how our cognitive and perceptual processes affect our musical experience; I am interested in how we can use such research to guide our compositional and analytic activities. ... View Profile

Roshanak Bigonah has studied Education and Technology, and Media with concentration in Video Production and Advertising. For the past 13 years, she has taught a wide range of courses in Digital Arts including  Graphic Arts, Web Design,  Photography, Videography and 3D Design. Roshanak Bigonah has worked as a freelance graphic and web designer.  In addition to her teaching interests Roshanak Bigonah, is a poet and has published four poetry books in her native language, Farsi. A collection of her works has been translated and published in Dutch and German. ... View Profile

I am a researcher on organization behavior, people analytics and entrepreneurship related topics, with particular focus on applying advanced econometrics and big data based research designs. I have particular expertise in the digital economy, including Internet video, sports analytics, and electronic gaming I also teach classes on general business strategy, technology management and entrepreneurship. View Profile

Jennifer deWinter has long been interested in how culture (which is local) moves internationally. She has spent a number of years analyzing anime, comics, and computer games as part of global media flows in order to understand how concepts such as "art," "culture," and "entertainment" are negotiated. In 2003, Professor deWinter joined the Learning Games Initiative, a group of scholars and game designers dedicated to the general study of games and the use of games to teach concepts and skills in particular. ... View Profile

Edward R. Gutierrez comes to WPI from a long and illustrious career in the animated feature film industry; having worked on films such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994) and many others. With degrees in both 2D Traditional Animation and 3D Animation and Visual Effects he has transitioned into independent filmmaking and dedicating his life to sharing his knowledge, love, and passion for drawing with new generations of students interested in drawing and storytelling. ... View Profile

Neil T. Heffernan enjoys doing educational data mining and running the ASSISTments system. ASSISTments helps schools teach better. It’s a web service hosted at WPI that allows teachers to assign nightly homework or daily class work. Students get instant feedback while teachers get live reports. Professor Heffernan enjoys supervising WPI students in creating ASSISTments content and features. He has  6 dozens paper in educational data mining, and 20+ papers in comparing different ways to optimize student learning. ... View Profile

V.J. Manzo (Ph.D. Temple University, M.M. New York University) is Associate Professor of Music at WPI. He is a composer and guitarist with research interests in theory and composition, artificial intelligence, interactive music systems, and music cognition. V.J. is author of several books published by Oxford University Press including Max/MSP/Jitter for Music, Foundations of Music Technology, and co-author of Interactive Composition and Environmental Sound Artists. ... View Profile

Dean O’Donnell is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and game writer. He has been interested in video games since winning his first Atari 2600 in the Kellogg’s “Stick Up for Breakfast!” contest in 1976. While writing plays he earned extra cash writing strategy guides and dialogue for long-forgotten games like One Must Fall 2097, and Highway Hunter. He is a published playwright, and his 2002 short film, Legwork 2002 Tom Luce Christian Stolte, can be found on YouTube. His work can also be found in Titan Quest: Immortal Throne the 2004 expansion pack to the hit game Titan Quest. ... View Profile

My research examines human-centered computing in digital arts practice. I designed and developed a creative coding environment for the browser, Gibber (http://gibber.cc), that I use both for educational research and audiovisual performances. Gibber is used to teach computational media to middle school, high school and university students in locations around the world, and I've performed with it throughout the US, UK and Asia in the experimental performance genre known as live coding. View Profile

My research is in human-computer interaction. One focus of my research is on next-generation interaction techniques, such as brain-computer interfaces, physiological computing, and reality-based interaction. I design, build and evaluate interactive computing systems that use machine learning approaches to adapt and support the user’s changing cognitive state and context. I also investigate novel paradigms for designing with accessibility in mind, particularly for the Deaf community. Much of my work also explores effective human interaction with complex and autonomous systems and vehicles. ... View Profile

I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Rhetoric. Before joining WPI, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. My work is animated by an intellectual curiosity with how ideas travel across time and space, and generate diverse practices of acting, seeing, and being in the world. I am especially intrigued by situations in which people come to ask new questions about themselves and others, in ways that require reconsideration of past experiences and imagining of future possibilities. ... View Profile