Marientina Gotsis

Gotsis is Associate Professor of Research at the Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. She has a broad background in arts, design and engineering with a special interest in interactive entertainment applications for health, happiness and rehabilitation. She founded and leads USC’s Games for Health Initiative since 2007, connecting health professionals with innovation in various forms of interactive media. She is co-founder and director of the Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center, an organized research unit between the School of Cinematic Arts and the Keck School of Medicine (est. 2010). This center designs, develops and evaluates entertainment applications at the intersection of behavioral science, medicine and public health. Her teams have developed interactive experiences and products to help increase literacy and public awareness, change behavior, and improve assessment and treatment techniques with funding from the National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Palix Foundation, Craig Neilsen Foundation, Department of Education, Department of Defense, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the Shafallah Center for Special Needs Children. Gotsis is an advisor the USC mHealth Collaboratory, the USC Institute for Integrative Health and the Center for Technology Innovation in Pediatrics. In 2015, the center commercially released The Brain Architecture Game, a tabletop game for teaching the science of early childhood, played by thousands of people around the world.
Gotsis has lectured about her research and practice at Apple and Karten Design, presented findings at ACM, IEEE and HCI journals and conferences, as well as medical and public health outlets. She has been an invited think-tank participant at the White House, the Institute For The Future and various NIH/NSF/EU-funded workshops. Her award-winning students have received recognition in festivals and prizes from the Apps for Healthy Kids challenge sponsored by the Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Initiative, the GE Healthymagination Student Award, Indiecade, Alt.Ctrl.GDC, ACM SIGGRAPH, Serious Games Showcase and Challenge, Unity Unite Awards, Cornell Cup USA, Vilcek Foundation, and the Conference of the Entertainment Software and Cognitive Neurotherapeutics Society.