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Alexandra Mazalek

Ali Mazalek

Toronto Metropolitan University, Co-Lead Knowledge Mobilization and Stakeholder Relations Working Group
EducationPhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Areas of ExpertiseDigital media, human-computer interaction, tangible and embodied interaction, interaction design, creativity, discovery
LinkedIn  (external link, opens in new window) 

Alexandra (Ali) Mazalek is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University. Ali works at the forefront of trends in computing and interaction design that support a tighter integration of the physical and digital worlds. She designs and develops tangible and embodied interaction systems that enable people to be more creative across both science and art disciplines. Her research interests include the design and application of emerging physical sensing and digital media technologies to areas such as narrative expression, abstract thinking, and scientific modeling, as well as the study and use of embodied cognition as a framework for tangible and embodied interaction design. She has published her research in a range of academic journals, delivered guest lectures in both academia and industry, and exhibited her media art works and interfaces at numerous galleries and festivals. 

Ali founded and directs the Synaesthetic Media Lab (Synlab) at Toronto Met and Georgia Tech, a research playground where physical materials, analog sensors, and digital media happily co-exist and come together in novel ways to support creativity and expression. Research is supported by industry and government organizations, including Intel, Steelcase, Turner, Google, NSF, and SSHRC.

 

Selected Publications

Mazalek, A., Wang, X. M., Southwick, D., Robinson, I., Nitsche, M., Resch, G., & Welsh, T. N. (2024). Prolonged exposure to mixed reality alters task performance in the unmediated environment. Scientific Reports, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-69116-w (external link) 

Chu, J. H., & Mazalek, A. (2019). Embodied Engagement with Narrative: A Design Framework for Presenting Cultural Heritage Artifacts. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 3(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti3010001 (external link) 

Harley, D., Verni, A., Willis, M., Ng, A., Bozzo, L., & Mazalek, A. (2018). Sensory VR: Smelling, Touching, and Eating Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 386–397). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173225.3173241 (external link)