Zoran Popovic is a Director of the Center for Game Science and a Professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Zoran’s research interests lie in the design and development of 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 have 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 -lay novices can be turned into highly-skilled domain experts capable of advancing scientific frontiers.
His current research focuses 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 field of computer graphics have been recognized recently by a number of awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.