CV

Zinan (Zina) Zhang

E342 Westgate Building, University Park, PA, 16802｜zzinan.com | zpz5281@psu.edu

Summary

Zinan (Zina) Zhang's research interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and video games. Zinan fundamentally contributes to building safer online gaming environments drawing from the perspectives of game design, online community, and learning. Zinan is currently focused on understanding how individual creators design video games and how they can be supported to create safe video games. 

Education

Ph.D. Student in Informatics | Pennsylvania State University                                                                                                    August 2022 - Current

College of Information Science and Technology  

B.S. in Computer and Information Science | Ohio State University                                                                             August 2018 - May 2022

College of Art and Science

Research Experiences

Research Assistant in Health and Play Lab, Pennsylvania State University                                                       August 2022 – Current

Responsibility: Recruited and interviewed participants, analyzed codes with qualitative and quantitative methods, paper writings 

Research Assistant in STIR Lab, University of Central Florida                                                                                                 May 2021 – May 2022

Responsibility: Recruited participants, run co-design sessions, analyzed codes with qualitative method, and paper writings.

Research Assistant in VECTOR Lab, Ohio State University                                                                                      January 2021 – May 2021

Responsibility: Interviewed participants and annotated data

Publications

Yubo Kou, Yingfan Zhou, Zinan Zhang, and Xinning Gui. 2023. The Ecology of Harmful Design: Risk and Safety of Game Making on a Metaverse Platform. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2023) (Under Review).

Zainab Agha, Zinan Zhang, Oluwatomisin Obajemu, Luke Shirley, and Pamela J. Wisniewski. 2022. A Case Study on User Experience Bootcamps with Teens to Co-Design Real-Time Online Safety Interventions. In the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI Case Study 2022). 

Services

Conference Reviewer in CHI 2023, CSCW 2023, CHI PLAY 2023

Work Experience

UX Intern in Tech Think                                                                                                                                                                                           July 2021 – May 2022

Skills

UX methods: Expert Evaluation, Competitive Analysis, and Usability Testing.

Research method: Interview, Participatory Design, Qualitative Coding

Programming languages: C, C#, Python, Java, MATLAB, SQL, HTML