Faculty & Staff

Gillian Smith, an award-winning game designer, joined WPI in 2017. Her interdisciplinary work merges technical research in AI and HCI with creative practice in textiles and games, with a view towards addressing social issues and broadening participation and perspectives on computing. Their research interests are in computational creativity, game design, computer science education, and the intersection of traditional crafts and computation. In 2021 Professor Smith was appointed director of WPI’s Interactive Media and Games Development program – one of the earliest gaming programs in the ...

Farley Chery specializes in simplifying artistic and technical concepts. Having a multidisciplinary background, he works with students in his specialized area of Technical art and other areas of experimentation like storytelling, and experimental game mechanics. Systems he created have been used in multiple games and films and are a core component of Epic games character pipeline and the basis for ART tools. His courses fuse representation, world-building, and character design; preparing students to be highly productive production artists.Before joining WPI he designed studio experiences for ...

Mark Claypool has been a professor of Computer Science and Interactive Media Game Development at WPI since 1997. Mark has a B.A. in Mathematics from Colorado College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers and written two books on computer games. He has chaired several ACM conferences on networks, games and multimedia and served on the technical program committee for over 40 of them. His research interests include multimedia networking, congestion control, network games and ...

Adryen Jean is an animated film producer bringing artists together to tell the stories that they want to. The goal of Adryen’s studio is to make entertaining art from the interests, loves and experiences of the artists on the film teams. This often entails making jokes or sometimes blowing minds while touching on or looking at subjects that matter to the artistic teams, even if they are grotesque topics. Adryen’s personal work deals with the issues of cultural displacement, forced assimilation and loss of identity, all of which touch the displaced Pueblo Native personally.  As an ...

Edward R. Gutierrez comes to WPI from a long 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), The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and many others. Professionally he is now a prolific independent filmmaker who concentrates on conservation of the environment and social issues. As a teacher, Ed is putting his degrees in both 2D Traditional Animation and 3D Animation and Visual Effects to use by dedicating his life to sharing his knowledge, love, and passion for drawing with new generations ...

Dr. Kagen is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Interactive Media & Game Development Program and a games studies and academic writer. After receiving her Ph.D. in Literature from Stanford University in 2016, she was a Lecturer in Digital Media & Gaming and Bangor University, a visiting scholar at the MIT Game Lab (in association with the Board Games & Colonialism project), and an Assistant Professor of Communication (with a focus on Gaming & Streaming) at Curry College. Dr. Kagen’s work has been published in Game Studies, Convergence, Gamevironments, Journal of Gaming ...

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.

Born to an artist mother and a musician father, Josh was destined from a young age for a life in the arts. An early interest in black and white darkroom photography and art-house cinema led him to study film and video art at Brown University. Fortuitously stumbling on a new course in multimedia art in his last term as an undergraduate, his zeal for digital media was unleashed. The next formative episode in Josh's career found him designing interactive exhibits, such as the claymation studio at Zeum, a hands-on, multimedia arts and technology museum for kids in San Francisco. While working at ...

Ben Schneider is a professor of practice in the Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD) program. Schneider is a video game writer and designer with twenty years of industry experience, who has created content for games such as “Empire Earth,” “Titan Quest,” “Dawn of War,” “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” and “Lord of the Rings Online.” His creative interests include procedural narrative systems, conventional prose, folklore, and experimental interactive narrative. Schneider received his BA from Columbia University.

Ralph Sutter is a character artist and animator, with a Bachelor of Science degree in Animation from the New England Institute of Art, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and with "Highest Honors" in the department.Two of his student pieces were featured in the 2010 Autodesk Student Entertainment Showreel with other 2010 awards including Animator of the Year, Highest Honors in Animation, and Intellectual Engagement.His video short "Mime Fight!" won the Best Animation award at AIME in 2010. Ralph Sutter comes to WPI most recently from industry experience as a Medical Animator and 3D Artist at ...

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. Such situations, I believe, capture an important aspect of the human ...

Walt joins WPI after a decade teaching at Becker College, where he was a Visiting Digital Fellow.  A management and production specialist, at Becker he revised and expanded the Production curriculum in the Interactive Media degrees, developing and teaching classes on the Agile/Scrum, Kanban and Waterfall/CPM production methodologies.  A problem solver, Walt often accepted the challenge of covering other courses, as needed, including Programming, Data Analytics, and Design.  He was also responsible for creating his signature Live Studio classes, partnered with industry professionals to ...

Emmanuel Agu is currently a professor in the computer science department at WPI having received his Masters and PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interests are in the areas of computer graphics, mobile computing, and wireless networks. He is especially interested in research into how to use a smartphone as a platform to deliver better healthcare. In collaboration with researchers at WPI and at UMass Medical School, he is currently working on NIH-funded research project to create a mobile application for chronic wound care ...

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. I am ...

As a systems engineer I view optimizing engineering endeavors as going beyond algorithmic optimization to include a humanitarian mission, using systems engineering tools, patterns, techniques, methods, themes, and philosophies to do policy modeling, all with the common goal of mission success. While engineering tools have brought about much excellence and productivity, we haven't always applied these powerful tools to goals such as human diversity in engineering, or looking at the full human as a participant in the human workforce. I pursue these ideas across multiple dimensions, from research ...

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. She is the founder and editor of an ...

Rose's academic interests lie where logic meets computer science: formal methods (the study of software correctness) and programming language theory. Her dissertation focuses on computer-assisted theorem-proving for cyber-physical systems: systems where computers are responsible for keeping physical things and people safe. Her favorite thing about these research topics is the connection to many fields.  She completed her PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2021. She was a recent visiting researcher at the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, JP) and past visitor at TU Munich ...

Our research integrates investigating the structure and function of targeted membrane proteins with development of mixed reality tools for workforce development. We combine biochemical and biophysical techniques to investigate the structure and function of two classes of membrane proteins. In the first instance, we are investigating the mechanism of a zinc transporter, hZIP4. This protein has been implicated in the initiation and progression of pancreatic cancer. Despite the central role of this protein in cellular homeostasis, the mechanism of cation transport is not well understood. ...

Information visualization is a powerful means for understanding data and informing human minds. As people begin to rely on visualizations to make high-impact and even life-critical decisions, there is a growing need to ensure that information can be perceived accurately and precisely. My research addresses these challenges by leveraging cognitive and perceptual principles to quantify and model user performance with visualizations. Results from these projects have led to visualization design guidelines in domains such as cyber security and health-risk communication, as well as a better ...

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. Professor Heffernan also Directs the Learning Science and Technologies ...

WPI provides opportunities to investigate worlds beyond your major, and one of those worlds might be art. It might seem an alien world, but many art skills can be useful beyond making art. Drawing enhances spatial perception. Solving design problems hones communication skills. Dreaming up impossible ideas can illuminate what is possible. While you learn to engineer certain outcomes in many disciplines, artmaking also encourages play and if you play you may discover new ways of thinking and doing. Sometimes students show up the first day of my art courses worried that they lack talent or ...

V.J. Manzo, Ph.D. is 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. He has created numerous software projects including the Modal Object Library, a collection of programming objects to control harmony in algorithmic and electro-acoustic compositions, ...

Erin Ottmar is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Learning Sciences at WPI. She received her BA in psychology and elementary education from the University of Richmond. After college, she spent several years teaching in Ecuador and Japan. In 2011, she received her PhD in Educational Psychology: Applied Developmental Science from the University of Virginia. After graduate school, spent 3 years as a post-doctoral research scientist at the University of Richmond. Before coming to WPI, she was most recently a visiting research associate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at ...

Professor Samson teaches art history, and his scholarship is in the history of architecture, especially the modern period. He studies and explains the moments of transition when styles change, and the spread of avant-garde creations into general currency. He is also interested in the history of industrial design, and enjoys introducing his students to it, revealing the complex background of forms and ideas behind common household objects. His architectural history courses explore both the left- and right-brain aspects of built form. Expression and function are intimately intertwined in all the ...

 My research is in human-computer interaction and human-AI interaction. One focus of my research is on next-generation interaction techniques, such as brain-computer interfaces, physiological computing, textile sensing, radar sensing, and reality-based interaction. My students and 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 ...