Zoran Popović
Faculty Web Page | Curriculum Vitae
Zoran Popović is a Director of Center of Game Science and a Professor of computer science at University of Washington. Zoran’s research interests lie in design and development interactive games and computer graphics research, focusing on scientific discovery through game play, learning games, high-fidelity human modeling and animation. His innovations in game technology has been licensed by Sony and Electronic Arts. More recently, his Center for Game Science spearheaded the genre of scientific discovery games, and produced Foldit, a biochemistry game with discoveries published in two Nature papers. Foldit introduced a brand new method of scientific discovery by showing that through extended game play novices can be turned into highly-skilled domain experts capable of advancing the scientific frontier . His current research is focusing on leveraging such expertise development towards new educational practices and outcomes. Recently his team produced an award-winning learning game that focused on fractional reasoning, and his follow-up projects aim at producing science and math games that automatically adapt to each student and their particular needs creating a customized tutor that both removes misconceptions and creates long term interest in math and science. His contributions to the research in interactive entertainment have been recently recognized by a number of awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.
