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), video games, and child education. 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
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, CSCW 2024, CHI 2024
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