Magy Seif El-Nasr | |
|---|---|
| Occupation(s) | Chair of Department of Computational Media, University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Website | magyel-nasr |
Magy Seif El-Nasr is a professor and Chair of the Department of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was appointed an endowed chair position in 2024 as the UC Presidential Chair. She directs the Games User interaction and Intelligence Lab at UCSC. She is recognized for her work in serious games, game design, game analytics, affective computing, and Artificial Intelligence. [1] [2]
Seif El-Nasr earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer science from the American University in Cairo in 1995. She went on to complete her Master of Science in Computer Science at Texas A&M University in 1998, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 2003. [3]
Before joining UCSC, she held several academic positions, including Professor and Vice Chair of the Serious Games Program at UCSC from 2020 to 2022, [4] Full Professor at Northeastern University in 2020, and Associate Professor (tenured) at Northeastern University from 2011 to 2020. [5] Additionally, she was appointed Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University from 2007 to 2011 and Pennsylvania State University from 2003 to 2007. [6] Seif El-Nasr has also held teaching positions at Northwestern University and Texas A&M University. [7]
As Chair of the Computational Media Department at UCSC, Seif El-Nasr oversees departmental budgets totaling over $4 million annually and has initiated several programs aimed at enhancing the student experience, increasing faculty diversity, and improving the department's visibility. [8]
Seif El-Nasr's research focuses on serious games, game design, game data science, user experience, affective computing, and the application of artificial intelligence in interactive systems. She has published extensively in these fields, with over 130 peer-reviewed conference papers and 38 journal articles. She manages a lab of researchers, including several post-doctoral fellows, PhD students, and Master’s students, as well as undergraduate students and volunteers. [9] [10]
Throughout her career, Seif El-Nasr has secured approximately $36.6 million in research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Department of Defense (DoD), and private industry. [8] [11]
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the main campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2023, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,812 undergraduate and 1,952 graduate students. Satellite facilities in other Santa Cruz locations include the Coastal Science Campus and the Westside Research Park and the Silicon Valley Center in Santa Clara, along with administrative control of the Lick Observatory near San Jose in the Diablo Range and the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
George William "Bill" Domhoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and research professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a founding faculty member of UCSC's Cowell College. He is best known as the author of several best-selling sociology books, including Who Rules America? and its seven subsequent editions.
Crown College is one of the residential colleges that makes up the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States.

Denice Dee Denton was an American professor of electrical engineering and academic administrator. She was the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The Baskin School of Engineering, known simply as Baskin Engineering, is the school of engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It consists of six departments: Applied Mathematics, Biomolecular Engineering, Computational Media, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Statistics.
History of Consciousness is the name of a department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz with a 50+ year history of interdisciplinary research and student training in "established and emergent disciplines and fields" in the humanities, arts, sciences, and social sciences based on a diverse array of theoretical approaches. The program has a history of well-known affiliated faculty and of well-known program graduates.
The UCSC Silicon Valley Initiatives are a series of educational and research activities which together increase the presence of the University of California in Silicon Valley. To that end, UC Santa Cruz has set up a 90,000 square-foot satellite campus called the University of Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus (SVC), currently located on Bowers street in Santa Clara, California, where it has been since April 2016 The Initiatives, still in the early stages of their development, have had ambitious hopes attached to them by UCSC, among them the possibility of a home for the University's long-planned graduate school of management and the Bio|Info|Nano R&D Institute. It currently houses professional the SVLink incubator-accelerator program, programs and a distance education site for the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering, the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, the Office of Industry Alliances and Technology Commercialization leadership, and the University of California's online learning program, UC Scout.

David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.
E. James Whitehead is Professor and Chair of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. He served as the Chair of the Computer Science department University of California, Santa Cruz from 2010 to 2014. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1989, and a PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, in 2000.

The Expressive Intelligence Studio is a research group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, established to conduct research in the field of game design technology. The studio is currently being run by Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who work closely with the students in their research.
Lise Getoor is an American computer scientist who is a distinguished professor and Baskin Endowed chair in the Computer Science and Engineering department, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests are in machine learning and reasoning with uncertainty, applied to graphs and structured data. She also works in data integration, social network analysis and visual analytics. She has edited a book on Statistical relational learning that is a main reference in this domain. She has published many highly cited papers in academic journals and conference proceedings. She has also served as action editor for the Machine Learning Journal, JAIR associate editor, and TKDD associate editor.
The University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC) based at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) is a consortium of nine University of California campuses and three Department of Energy laboratories. The consortium's goal is to support and facilitate original research and education in computational astrophysics and to engage in public outreach and education.
Constance "Connie" Mary Rockosi is a professor and former department chair in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in 2001 and helped design the camera for the telescope that was used as part of the initial Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). She also was in charge of the SDSS-III domain for the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE) project and is the primary investigator on SEGUE-2. Her focuses involve the study of the Milky Way galaxy, with a focus on the evolution that it took to reach its current state.
Cynthia Larive is an American scientist and academic administrator serving as the chancellor of University of California, Santa Cruz. Larive's research focuses on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and mass spectrometry. She was previously a professor of chemistry and provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of California, Riverside. She is a fellow of AAAS, IUPAC and ACS, associate editor for the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry and editor of the Analytical Sciences Digital Library.
The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs are the athletic teams that represent the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Banana Slugs compete in Division III of the NCAA, mostly in the Coast to Coast Athletic Conference (C2C). There are fifteen varsity sports – men's and women's basketball, tennis, soccer, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, track & field, and women's golf. UCSC teams have been Division III nationally ranked in tennis, soccer, men's volleyball, and swimming. UCSC maintains a number of successful club sides.
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella's career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella's research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
The Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz constitutes one of the oldest departments of gender and sexuality studies in the world. It was founded as a women's studies department in 1974. It is considered among the most influential departments in feminist studies, post-structuralism, and feminist political theory. In addition to its age and reputation, the department is significant for its numerous notable faculty, graduates, and students.
The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute is a public research institution based in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Genomics Institute's scientists and engineers work on a variety of projects related to genome sequencing, computational biology, large data analytics, and data sharing. The institute also maintains a number of software tools used by researchers worldwide, including the UCSC Genome Browser, Dockstore, and the Xena Browser.

Jean H. Langenheim was an American plant ecologist and ethnobotanist, highly respected as an eminent scholar and a pioneer for women in the field. She has done field research in arctic, tropical, and alpine environments across five continents, with interdisciplinary research that spans across the fields of chemistry, geology, and botany. Her early research helped determine the plant origins of amber and led to her career-long work investigating the chemical ecology of resin-producing trees, including the role of plant resins for plant defense and the evolution of several resin-producing trees in the tropics. She wrote what is regarded as the authoritative reference on the topic: Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany, published in 2003.