Meet Our Team

Dr. Leanne Chukoskie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, Movement, and Rehabilitation Science in the Bouvé College of Health, and the Games Program in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. Her researcher focuses on sensory-motor behavior, especially eye movement behavior and its neural correlates across both typical and atypical development.

Minxin Cheng finished her BA in television editing and journalism and earned her MA in digital media design. She joined the PTHMRS program and the ReGame-XR Lab in 2019. Her work focuses on individual factors and contextual factors that impact children’s motor learning in virtual environments, with the ultimate goal of creating transferrable knowledge on using immersive virtual reality to improve children’s motor function rehabilitation.

Anna received her Ph.D from the Graduate Center, CUNY in developmental psychology in 2018 and her MS in Speech-Language Pathology from Northeastern University in 2023. Her research embraces a strengths-based perspective on autism research, with hopes to find new insights by drawing together elements from her academic background, from archaeology, to clinical experiences working with autistic clients, to her research on language acquisition and the neural correlates of metaphor.

Sundar’s primary research focuses on understanding the theoretical framework of Active Inference under multi-sensory conflict in individuals with Autism through the use of sensor technologies. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from, a Master’s degree in Immunology from Tokyo Medical and Dental University and another Master’s degree in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University. He started his Ph.D at UC San Diego with Dr. Chukoskie in the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders before joining.

Trent’s research interests involve the creation of novel virtual reality interventions for use in various non-neurotypical disorder treatments. He is focused on using his time as a student to hone his skills for this kind of work, and plan to take his talents into the private sector with the goal of helping as many people as possible.

Yijun comes from a Human-Computer Interaction Graduate Student at Drexel University before joining the Human Movement and Rehabilitation Sciences program at Northeastern to further their knowledge in medical research.

Yichi’s research specializes in architectural and game design, exploring how both physical and virtual environments influence human cognition, engagement, and performance.

Lara’s interest lies in gaming as a vehicle for storytelling and communication, and what interaction brings to the narrative experience. She joined the Playful Mind Lab as an intern in 2022, and seeks to use her Narrative Design experience to create immersive and memorable research projects.

Nitika’s interest revolves around machine learning and natural language processing and how they can be used to bring innovative solutions to the table.

Cole’s passion is in crafting beautiful user experiences through evidence-based design, motivated by ambiguous problems that demand creative and innovative solutions.