Hi, I'm Marj! (pronouns: she/her).

I'm a UX Researcher and a Computational Media PhD student in the Alternative Learning Technologies & Games Lab at UC Santa Cruz.

As researchers, empathy should be at the heart of everything we do! I study games in grad school because they emphasize the engagement and enjoyment of the player/user experience. I use mixed-methods processes and design to research my various interests across human-computer interaction (HCI) and games.

My PhD work is in game design research --
I'm interested in exploring how challenge design relates to player experience and affective/social-emotional learning in games. I use (games) user research methods and also explore embodied interaction (XR) to study this.