Teo Chor Guan has more than 14 years of experience in systems engineering for computer graphics and games. Her wide range of experience spans from 3-D graphics research at the Institute of Systems Science in Singapore to building air traffic control systems for MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates in Canada. She has also worked as a software developer at Electronic Arts (EA) Canada for over six years. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronics) from the National University of Singapore and a Masters in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. In Singapore, she had worked in the Games Development Group at the School of Design at Nanyang Polytechnic. She was also the Software Engineering Manager in Lucasfilm Animation Singapore before joining Media Development Authority (MDA) as the Program Director for GAMBIT.

Dominic Chai graduated from Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University. He has been eager to  explore the 'wonders' of the Game Industry. Equipped with 4 years of Game Development experience and a strong passion for games, he has hoped to see his retirement in this industry some day. Dominic participated in the GAMBIT summer internship 2007 as a Scrum-Master to develop a game for two months. Upon his return, he continued his journey and began to work as a Production Assistant at Mikoishi Pte Ltd, a Singapore games development studio. He is currently an Assistant Producer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (Singapore lab), and hopes to learn and work with the professionals and talents the industry has to offer.

Chai Pei Shan graduated with a Bachelor of Social Sciences (Hons.) in Communications and New Media, focusing on new media studies and communications management, with a Minor in Technopreneurship from the National University of Singapore.

During her free time, she explores digital photography, cultures, graphic and web design. She also enjoys playing games, reading about new media arts and trends in technological innovation.

Peishan was previously involved in reviewing the national youth development policy and designing youth programmes at the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, Singapore, as well as Marcom roles during her stint at the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation and Singapore Press Holdings (The Strait Times.com). Her experiences include e-marketing and social media engagement.

Maureen Chew is the administrator for the Singapore GAMBIT lab. She has an advanced diploma in Mass Communications and was previously working as a customer service cum events executive with a media company. She is a fan of MMORPGs and has been so for many years now. Besides playing games, in her free time she enjoys reading, whipping up dishes, hanging out with her buddies and playing the piano.

Bruce Chia Bruce Chia is a fourth year undergraduate of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He has a strong interest in developing games in all aspects. He specializes in programming but also has a keen eye for colors, a keen ear for music and a keen mind for game design. Working on games allows him to express his creativity in all areas and never fails to be less than an extremely fulfilling experience for him. During his spare time at his university, he ran a Game Developer Interest Group and influenced the student game developing scene by organizing workshops and competitions, including Singapore's very first Contrast Game Design competition. He also achieved the Best Technical game in the 2006 Code-a-thon competition and became the lead programmer for the GAMBIT games AudiOdyssey and CarneyVale: Showtime. He aspires to one day develop games which would inspire the world, just as other great games have inspired his world.

William Hutama started playing games in kindergarten in 1988, when he received a NES console for his birthday, along with Super Mario Bros. This eventually led him to become a fan of Shigeru Miyamoto, who inspired him to be a game developer.

William graduated from Nanyang Technological University in 2008 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. He has a strong interest in programming and mathematics, and his experience in real world programming projects range from writing an AI for chess, to participating in a firefighting robot contest with a 16K chip, to cognitive autonomous vehicle navigation using neural networks. Though his previous projects were not much related to games, when he joined the GAMBIT summer internship programme just after graduation, he got hands-on experience in a real game development project. He still continues to serve GAMBIT as a game programmer in the Singapore GAMBIT Game Lab.

Besides playing games, during his free time and when he has extra power after working hours, William explores such game programming aspects as graphics (openGL), particle systems, physics, and learning to become a rapid game prototyper. He hopes that one day he can make epic, fun games that people have never seen before.

Yeo Jing Ying graduated from National University of Singapore under the Arts and Social Sciences faculty, where she became interested in game design and development process during her course of study. Upon graduation, she participated in an internship with GAMBIT to develop a game prototype as a Game Designer within 2 months at Boston. When she returned to Singapore, her first job was at Mikoishi Pte Ltd, a game development studio, as a Production Assistant for around a year. Currently, she has moved on to work at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab as an Assistant Producer. She hopes to acquire as much experience and knowledge in the games industry as she can by learning from and working with the experts and professionals in this industry.

Ang Yi Xin graduated from Nanyang Technological University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Animation. She enjoyed her first game development experience at GAMBIT as an artist for Picopoke in 2008. As a hardcore casual gamer, she prefers to play games which she can never die (so she will set god-mode in games where death is a possibility and cheating is an option). Her team won the Most Entertaining Game award at NUS Contrast'08 for the game MooPoot. During her free time, she likes to loiter on Facebook, watch movies, swim, draw and hang out with her family and friends. Her latest craze is Snap Escape. Really! Find out more about her work on http://www.pencilandpixel.net.

William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universitat Berlin, and Philips Universitat Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research.

Uricchio considers the transformation of media technologies into cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of 'old' media (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and new media) when they were new. And in part, he investigates the interactions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and reenactments.

His most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (2008, Chicago). He is currently completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present.

His website can be found at www.williamuricchio.com.

Specialties: history of media technologies and practices (print, photography, telegraphy, telephony, television, film, digital technologies...); media theory (representation, reception, aesthetic paradigms); social/cultural processes (hierarchization and differentiation); and algorithmic culture

Henry Jenkins III is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide; Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture; The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture; Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture; Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Jenkins writes regularly about media and cultural change at his blog, henryjenkins.org.

Jenkins has a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Specialties: the cultural and social aspects of new media, games research (gender and games, education and games, serious games, games as expressions of the culture, trends in the games industry), the role of new media in politics, fan cultures, youth and new media literacy, transmedia storytelling, reality television, comic book culture, children's literature and media, the future of news and journalism, the future of advertising and branding

Philip Tan is the executive director for the US operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a game research initiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore.

He has served as a member of the steering committee of the Singapore chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and worked closely with Singapore game developers to launch industry-wide initiatives and administer content development grants as an assistant manager in the Animation & Games Industry Development section of MDA. He has produced and designed PC online games at The Education Arcade, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied and created educational games. He complements a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies with work in Boston's School of Museum of Fine Arts, the MIT Media Lab, WMBR 88.1FM and the MIT Assassins' Guild, the latter awarding him the title of "Master Assassin" for his live-action roleplaying game designs. He also founded a DJ crew at MIT.

Specialties: digital, live-action and tabletop game design, production and management

Jason Beene is GAMBIT's Art Director, helping our team breathe life into the zeros and ones. Previously, Jason served as Studio Art Director of an internal THQ development group. During those 7 years, Jason was instrumental in the production of numerous Nintendo handheld titles and had the opportunity to work with the likes of Pixar and Nickelodeon. His time at THQ was proudly spent doing everything from pixel pushing to managing/mentoring a talented art staff. Additionally, as an alumni of the Rhode Island School of Design illustration department, Jason aims to offer both industry insight and his own creative talents to help further the efforts of GAMBIT. His artblog can be found at http://jasonbeene.blogspot.com.

Specialties: visual arts, digital art, video game art, video game industry

Thanks to two wonderfully dedicated game-playing grandmothers, Andrew Grant started playing games before he could hold the cards. From there, he went on to explore board games, strategy games, role-playing games, and computer games. This exploration shows no signs of slowing down.

Andrew graduated from MIT in 1993 with Bachelor's degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics (6 and 18, darnit) and a minor in Creative Writing. After 6 months in the real world, he discovered that someone would actually pay him to design and program computer games, so he returned to his gamer roots by joining Looking Glass Technologies, and then DreamWorks Interactive. Since then, Andrew has survived 10 years as a programmer-for-hire and independent developer in projects ranging from underwater robotics to yet more games. Now, Andrew is the Technical Director for GAMBIT, applying his rather eclectic skillset to the wide array of technologies used in the lab.

Specialties: computer programming, computer game development, game design, tabletop role playing games

Marleigh Norton is the Lead Interaction Designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a strange title that mostly means she does whatever needs doing, whether it be interaction design, leading student game development teams, or providing emergency voice acting. Luckily, she has a long history of extremely diverse projects so variety is nothing new. As a research manager at the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program, she designed educational augmented reality games on topics such as the illegal wildlife trade, climate change, and local politics. Her work as an interaction designer for the Waterford Research Institute aimed to teach reading, math, and science to young children through games, books, and songs. She holds a master's degree in human-computer interaction from Georgia Tech, where she created an augmented reality 3-D puzzle game. New interaction paradigms are a major interest of hers, and past projects have included collaborative touch-screens for the NASA Ames Research Center and voice user interfaces for major telephone companies. Her current research interest is conversation in games.

Specialties: human-computer interaction, user interface design, educational games, games for children, location-based gaming, augmented reality, experimental input devices

Abe Stein began making goofy noises when he was very young, creating detailed action sequences and death defying car chases on the kitchen floor with his G.I. Joes and Matchbox cars. Having since been enlightened to the capabilities of recording technology, Abe can still be found in front of a microphone trying to replicate the sound of a 1986 IROC-Z engine with his mouth.

Abe graduated from Haverford College with a Bachelor's degree in Religion, and studied audio engineering and sound design at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts of Boston University. A one-time high school English and History teacher, his sound design, music and mix work can be heard on a variety of educational videos, long and short form documentary films, various promotional shorts, and on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim animated series Assy McGee. Abe comes to the GAMBIT having most recently worked as a sound designer for Blue Fang Games, makers of the Zoo Tycoon franchise. As Audio Director at GAMBIT, Abe is looking forward to exploring new ways to improve the efficacy of sound in games to help create compelling, evocative and meaningful experiences.

His website can be found at www.stein-sound.com.

Specialties: Vroom, Clang, Zip, Click, Pop, and Boom.

Sara Verrilli has spent her professional career in the videogame industry, starting with the day she walked out of MIT's Course V graduate studies and into a position as QA Lead at Looking Glass Technologies for System Shock. However, her game organizing endeavors started much earlier; she helped found a role-playing club at her high school by disguising it as a bridge group.

Since then, she's been a game designer, a product manager, a producer, and a QA manager, in no particular order. A veteran of both Looking Glass Technologies and Irrational Games, she's worked on eight major published games, and several more that never made it out the door. As Lead Producer at GAMBIT, she looks forward to corralling, encouraging, and exploring the creative chaos that goes into making great games, and figuring out just the right amount of order to inject into the process. And, while she still doesn't understand bridge, she does enjoy whist.

Mia Consalvo is Visiting Associate Professor in the Comparative Media Studies program for 2009-2010. She is also Associate Professor at Ohio University in the School of Media Arts and Studies. She is currently serving as the Vice President of the Association of Internet researchers, to become President of the organization this October, and she is on the steering committee of Women in Games International. Her current research examines several topics, including the role of Japan in the formation of the videogame industry, the culture of casual games, and women's gameplay. Her work has been published in Cinema Journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Games and Culture, among others. She is also the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames from MIT Press, and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.

Clara Fernández-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Her work concentrates on adventure games, as well as the integration of stories in simulated environments. She is particularly interested in cross-media artifacts from the standpoint of textual analysis and performance.

Clara holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a BA in English Studies by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2000), and was awarded a fellowship from the La Caixa Foundation to pursue a Masters in Comparative Media Studies from MIT (2004).

Specialties: videogame theory, textual analysis, adventure games, stories in games, spatial design, puzzles, performance, relationships between games and other media, theatre, film, Quality Assurance.

As Studio Manager for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Rik Eberhardt spends his days playing Tetris: with people, boxes, tasklists, equipment, and time. When not staring at a spreadsheet trying to fit in another computer purchase, a last minute event budget, or placing undergraduate researchers on a GAMBIT project, he's chipping away at spreadsheets on his DS, reproducing pixel-art in Picross and Picross 3D. His favorite moments on the job are working on projects with student workers and having fun social interactions forced on him despite his busy schedule.

Rik also produces and DJs a radio program on WMBR, "Last Dance at the Death Disco," featuring postpunk and underground music produced from the 70s-80's in the US, UK, and Europe: http://deathdisco.fm

Specialties: production, management, postpunk, cats

Generoso Fierro is the Outreach Coordinator for GAMBIT, where he creates video the content for our website, assists with the summer program and produces GAMBIT events. Currently, Generoso is at WMBR, where he is the longtime DJ of a program "Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady." The show concentrates on the music of Jamaica prior to reggae (mento, ska and rocksteady) and has been on the air since 1997. A film maker and avid film fan, "Gene" has directed and produced two feature documentaries, "Lynn Taitt: Rocksteady" about the Trinidadian born guitarist who invented the rocksteady rhythm and "Derrick Morgan: I Am The Ruler", featuring the titled legendary "King of Ska" from Jamaica.

Specialties: documentary film making (specifically early Jamaican musics); club and radio DJ at WMBR 88.1 covering Jamaican music from 1955-1970

Claudia Forero-Sloan comes to GAMBIT from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she worked as a Financial Assistant for the past two years and supported three Faculty in the Sloan Management Science department as an Administrative Assistant for five years before that. She will continue working with finance and administration for GAMBIT. In her free time, Claudia enjoys reading and playing with her 5-year-old daughter Annabella.

As Technology Support Specialist Michael Rapa is the first point of contact for CMS and GAMBIT technical support. He received his BFA from The Art Institute of Boston in 2007 with a focus on Graphic Design and Digital Illustration and continues to draw whenever he can. He also makes games sometimes... Check out his work at his website: http://michaelrapa.com

Jason Begy graduated from Canisius College in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and in 2008 earned a Master's degree in Professional Writing and Information Design from Northeastern University. Continuing the process of avoiding a career, he then came to CMS as a graduate student where he wrote his master's thesis on the use of metaphor in game criticism and design. Current projects include ongoing research into casual games and modes of representation in games. He blogs about board game semiotics at gamebits.tumblr.com.

Had you asked Todd Harper at age 17 -- a music education major at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, 11 year euphonium and choir veteran -- if someday he would be a researcher at MIT studying games, there's a good chance he'd have laughed at such an absurd claim. Yet 15 years and one doctorate later, here he is, a postdoctoral researcher at GAMBIT.

After getting his bachelor's degree in Radio/TV/Film at Madison in 2001, he worked in distance learning and web editing at Indiana State University before moving to his hometown of Syracuse for a masters in Media Studies at Syracuse University, and then to Ohio University for a recently-completed doctorate in Mass Communications. His research combines a focus on digital games with an interest in feminist and queer theory and popular culture.

When he is not doing actual research on games, Todd spends a good deal of time playing them; his favorites tend to be over the top fighting games and RPGs that appeal to his campy sense of aesthetics. Inspired by the fighting game players he spoke to while working on his dissertation, his next goal is to travel to the EVO tournament in 2011, learn to use an arcade stick, and still get thoroughly destroyed in the first round of the tourney.

You can follow him on Twitter or read his highly infrequently updated blog, Stay Classy.

Specialties: Game studies, fighting games, popular culture, textual analysis, game criticism, mass media criticism, media and identity

Andrew conducts the communications efforts for CMS (websites, press relations, and project and event publicity) as well as those for MIT's Center for Future Civic Media.

A native of Washington, D.C., he holds degrees in communication from Wake Forest University and in creative writing from Emerson College. His marketing and P.R. skills were honed first at Houghton Mifflin and later at Tufts University. He was also the long-time fiction editor for Identity Theory and is developing a literary aggregation tool at Readsfeed.com.

Konstantin Mitgutsch is a Max Kade visiting researcher at the Education Arcade. He worked in the fields of learning, media studies, computer games and age rating systems at the University of Vienna for several years. His research focuses on learning processes in computer games and in particular on the role of passion, disappointment, failure and confrontation in gameplay experiences. In his project titled "Re-Learning Patterns in Computer Games" supported by the Max Kade Foundation New York, Mitgutsch investigates central learning patterns that foster recursive and deep forms of learning in games.

He studied Media Education and Philosophy of Education at the University of Vienna and the Humboldt University Berlin and earned a MA in Education Science, Sociology, Media Studies and Philosophy (2003) and a Ph.D. in 2009. He is participating as an expert member for the Austrian Federal Office for the Positive Assessment of Computer and Console Games and is on the expert council of the Pan European Game Information (PEGI). Since 2007 he organizes the annual Vienna Games Conference FROG.