VRchaeology
An NSF-supported virtual field school in Unreal Engine where students learn archaeological methods in an immersive cave. I coordinated production, led UX evaluation and playtesting, and built the gamified course app.
FOR RECRUITERS AND HIRING COMMITTEES
I work where games, XR, and museums meet.
Researching, producing, and prototyping interactive experiences people can actually use, learn from, and come back to.
I'm a PhD student in Informatics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with nine years across design studios, funded production teams, and two tech startups. From an NSF-funded VR learning platform to a no-install AR pipeline for small museums, my constant is the person on the other side of the screen: I test with real players and visitors, including people with disabilities, and turn what I see into decisions a team can ship.
Availability
Available for Summer 2027 internships and full-time roles from mid-2028 (PhD expected May 2028).
Authorized to work in the U.S., no sponsorship required
Based in Champaign, IL. Open to relocation, hybrid, or on-site roles.
How I work
Whatever the team, I do three things.
Research with real people
Mixed-methods studies, playtests, and usability evaluation, including IRB-approved accessibility sessions with wheelchair users and player-review mining across 1,371 Steam games.
Ship with a team
Associate producer on three externally funded titles, owning scope, milestones, QA, and sponsor communication across programmers, designers, and artists. Co-founded two startups, one funded and patented.
Prototype and test
Trained as an architect and landscape architect, I build early in Unity, Unreal, and Three.js, from a no-install museum AR pipeline (Skopiora XR) to a dataset of XR adoption across 161 U.S. museums.
Teams I fit: product and production, UX research, design, and museum technology.
Featured projects
Skopiora XR
A WebAR and 3D experience of a carved brush pot from the Spurlock Museum, opened from a QR code with no app install, built so a small museum can repeat the whole pipeline with free tools.
DIGITAGE El Paso
An interactive, accessible map of the Trost & Trost buildings of El Paso, from a 2022 prototype to a 2026 web edition, with a paper presented at ASCAAD 2026.
Beneath the Stone
A low-resource, text-based game about representing marginalized heritage without turning it into spectacle. Presented at SIGraDi 2026.
Skills
Recognition
Herbert G. Schaefer Scholarship ($10,000, 2026). Student Scholar Awards from the Association for Preservation Technology International (three years) and the National Council for Preservation Education (four consecutive years). Ivan Petrovic Prize, eCAADe 2021. Phi Kappa Phi.
Three journal articles, one book chapter (Routledge), twelve conference papers, sixteen peer-reviewed presentations and nine invited lectures. See the publications. References are available on request.
Degrees
- Ph.D., Informatics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2024 to May 2028 (expected)
- M.Sc., Architecture (Historic Preservation), Texas Tech University, 2024, with Honors
- M.Sc., Landscape Architecture, Istanbul Technical University, 2022, with Honors
Languages
English (professional), Persian and Azerbaijani (native), Turkish (advanced, spoken).