Rate My Professor Manolya Kavakli-Thorne

Professor Manolya Kavakli-Thorne is Professor of Gamification and Simulation Technology in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Aston University. She serves as Program Leader for Gamification at the Sir Peter Rigby Digital Futures Institute since September 2023 and is the founding Head of the SIGMA Research Group focused on Simulation, Interaction, and Gamification Models and Architecture. She earned her BSc in 1987, MSc in 1990, and PhD in 1995 from Istanbul Technical University. She held a NATO Science Fellowship for postdoctoral research in the United Kingdom in 1996 and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney in 1998. Her career includes roles as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University from 1989 to 1999; Lecturer in Game Design and Acting Course Coordinator at Charles Sturt University in 2000; Senior Lecturer in Computer Graphics and Game Design, Associate Professor, Director of the Virtual Reality Lab from 2005 to 2020, and Postgraduate Program Director from 2014 to 2018 at Macquarie University; and Professor and Academic Director of the AIE Institute from 2018 to 2023. She holds an Honorary Professorship at Macquarie University.

With over 35 years of interdisciplinary research experience, Professor Kavakli-Thorne specializes in human-computer interaction, human-machine interaction, virtual and augmented reality, integrated system design, and game engineering, with current emphases on digital twins, gamified system design, and mixed reality simulations. She has secured 58 competitive grants totaling over £18.1 million from sources including EU Horizon, Australian Research Council, UKRI, NSF China, and others, funding pioneering facilities such as the first Virtual Reality Lab in Sydney (2005), Simulation Hub and CEPET Research Center (2015), and Virtual Production Studio in Canberra (2022). She has supervised 14 postdoctoral fellows and 119 postgraduate students. Her 240 refereed publications have garnered over 3700 citations (h-index 26). Notable works include 'The structure of concurrent cognitive actions: A case study on novice and expert designers' (Design Studies, 2002), 'Sketching as mental imagery processing' (Design Studies, 2001), and 'Human-Centered User Interface Design for Explainable AI in Chest Radiology: A Multi-Phase Co-Design Approach' (IEEE Access, 2026). She has received awards such as Best Paper at the 42nd IEEE ICDCS (2022), multiple best paper awards at conferences including ICIEA (2018), DESRIST (2017), and CENTRIC (2014), and fellowships from the Turkish Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UK societies in the 1990s. She has delivered keynote speeches on virtual reality, gesture recognition, and HCI at international conferences.