Staff & Contributors
The Games for Health Project is run by a small staff augmented by additional freelance help from design and communications firms around the U.S.
As the Project has grown we’ve begun recruiting contributors from among our most engaged and knowledgeable community members. These contributors lead by example of their work, their dedication to help others in their field, and their willingness to make the time to help organize and further sub communities relative to their topic within the greater games for health field.
The Project also is beginning to recognize international contributors with our growing ambassadors program which provides links to country and region leaders who we feel do a good job providing information about games for health efforts in their country. Once recognized as an ambassador these leaders agree to act as conduits and connectors to activities, organizations, and individuals in their country for those from away who may be looking for initial support to engage country-by-country with others in the games for health field.
Staff
Ben Sawyer
Since beginning his career in game development over ten years ago, Ben Sawyer has pioneered major initiatives in the field of serious games and has become a nationally recognized leader within the games community.
For the past seven years, Sawyer has dedicated his professional life to discovering new ways to expand the use of games beyond entertainment. In 2002, he co-founded the Serious Games Initiative, a project of the U.S. Government’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The following year, Sawyer organized the first-ever Serious Games Summit – a conference which now attracts 300-500 attendees annually, who meet to share best practices in the development of serious games. The Serious Games Initiative continues to serve as one of the leading organizations in the field of serious games.
In 2004, Sawyer also co-founded the Games for Health project, an initiative which has built the primary social and professional networks of the health games industry. Through on-line resources and regular regional and national events, Games for Health connects health professionals, researchers, and game developers in order to advance the development of health games and game technologies. The Games for Health project receives major funding from the Pioneer Portfolio, an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
As a game developer with his own firm, Digitalmill, Sawyer has worked on over two dozen major serious game projects which began in 2000, when he served as producer for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s university simulation game, “Virtual U,” which was an award finalist at that year’s Independent Games Festival.
Prior to pursuing his professional career, Sawyer graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and studied at Baruch College. He currently resides in Freeport, Maine with his wife Olivia and their two sons (and future gamers), ages 6 and 4.
Beth Bryant
After graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in economics in 1990, Beth moved to Calfornia and put her passion for skiing to work in the marketing department at Kirkwood Ski Resort in Lake Tahoe.
Eventually, Beth moved back to Maine, working as the sales and marketing coordinator for a nationally recognized jewelry designer and at Idexx Laboratories, a leading veterinary diagnostics supplier. Today, Beth deals with all day-to-day undertakings for the Games for Health Project, and heads up conference operations for our various events each year.
Away from work, Beth splits her time between the Baltimore-DC corrider and the Greater Portland Area. She enjoys spending time with her dog Tucker, boating in Casco Bay in the summer and skiing at Sugarloaf during the winter.
Contributors
The individuals below have agreed to provide contributing perspectives and news to the games for health blog. Many are also recognized track leaders for our annual Games for Health Conference held each spring in Boston, MA. While we applaud their demonstrated leadership and expertise, and generally are supportive of their efforts on behalf of the games for health field, their recognition here is not a formal endorsement of their individual work, publications, services, or products they offer in their own respective positions.
Alan Au 
Alan Au is an academic and game industry advocate. He is currently pursuing his PhD in biomedical and health informatics at the University of Washington, examining the use of technology to improve healthcare practice and policy. He is also exploring the use of games and simulation to support medical education and population wellness in conjunction with the University of Washington Institute for Simulation & Interprofessional Studies. Alan received his undergraduate degree in computer science from M.I.T. and spent several years as a professional developer of both business and biotech software. He has also been a game industry journalist for over a decade, writing about various aspects of video game culture.
Barbara Chamberlain
Barbara Chamberlin is the Extension Instructional Design and Educational Media Specialist. Dr. Chamberlin directs the NMSU Learning Games Lab, where she researches games preferences and use, as well as new trends in computer games for education. She leads research on game development at the lab, and serves as an instructional designer on new educational projects. In addition she submits several grants each year, seeking funding for the development of educational media in many content areas. NMSU launched the “Exergames Unlocked” Website, exegamesunlocked.com, a resource to help others use exergames in programs and classrooms.
She is currently working on a wide variety of projects, including exergames and gaming projects in math and science. In the past few years, NMSUs game development team has begun investigating the use of physical interfaces with games and creating new games that encourage users to move. Previously a stand-up comic, Chamberlin speaks nationally on a variety of topics, including technology use with youth.
Parvati Dev
Parvati leads Innovation in Learning Inc., to develop online virtual hospitals and homes, with virtual patients and families, for healthcare education.
Noah Falstein
Noah Falstein is the President of The Inspiracy (www.theinspiracy.com), a consulting firm specializing in game design and production. He has served on the advisory boards of the Games for Health Conference and Serious Games Summit, has been designing and producing award-winning games since 1980, and was one of the first ten employees at LucasArts Entertainment, The 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive. The Inspiracy does original design and design review projects for clients on five continents, ranging from corporate training (Cisco, Microsoft) to medical education (Hopelab, Health Media Lab, Medical Cyberworlds) to entertainment (LucasArts, Disney, DreamCatcher, MicroForte).
Catherine Frederico
President of Frederico Arts LLC, Catherine Frederico is a registered dietitian and a member of the American Dietetic Association. She holds a bachelor’s degree from The Pennsylvania State University in Biological Health/Nutrition Science and a master’s degree from Arizona State University in Home Economics/Food and Nutrition. Presently she holds nutrition science adjunct professor positions at Regis College in Weston, MA and Newbury College in Brookline, MA. Catherine also consults at the new Kingsbury Club in Medfield, MA and hosts a multimedia website, www.NutritionVision.info. She is a frequent speaker for Health Promotions Affiliates at various corporate events, and also gives webinars to registered dietitians on the use of social media in their practice.
Catherine’s professional career includes thirteen years as a renal dietitian for National Medical Care and Fresenius working at a kidney dialysis unit in Boston, MA. She is widely published in this area and is a former Recognized Renal Dietitian of the Year, honored by the Council on Renal Nutrition of the National Kidney Foundation, and also a Recognized Young Dietitian of the Year by the American/Massachusetts Dietitian Association. She is a former chair of the Council on Renal Nutrition of New England, co-editor of the CRN Quarterly, and co-author of a peer-reviewed article on nutrition and renal kinetic modeling which won the American Dietetic Association’s prestigious Mary P Huddleson award for best journal research article. She owned Apronstrings, a children’s nutrition venture, in the mid 1990s. During her summers on Cape Cod in 2004 and 2005 she led youth workshops to produce nutrition public service announcements, as she is certified in cable television production. Her book, NutritionVision, was a result of her work there.
Presently, Catherine is developing Food Focus: Fruits, an iPhone app that uses creative food photography to teach fruit recognition to children and adults. Food Focus, the computer game, was first developed as part of the USDA/IGDA Game Jams in May of 2010.
Jeffrey Taekman, M.D.
Dr. Taekman is a Board Certified Anesthesiologist, the Assistant Dean for Educational Technology, Director of the Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, the Co-Director of Duke Clinical Research Institute’s Center for Educational Excellence. He has more than fifteen years experience in educational technology, simulation and informatics. Dr. Taekman was a founder, the inaugural Secretary and served on the Board of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare during its establishment. He has directed the interdisciplinary Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center since its inception. The HSPSC model, with clinicians and educators working side-by-side with human factors engineers, has been cited as a 21st Century model for improving patient safety. Dr. Taekman’s research focuses on the use of technology in improving patient safety. Areas of interest include informatics, educational technology, mobile computing, and immersive education.
Dr. Taekman is pioneering the use of high-fidelity simulation to improve the safety and quality of clinical trials. His current research includes: (1) evaluation of the role of simulation on clinical trial design and implementation, (2) comparison of interactive methods of evaluating health care team performance, and (3) development of a virtual environments to improve healthcare education and patient safety. He is active in both the development and evaluation of virtual environments / serious games for healthcare. His current development / evaluation of efficacy projects include 3DiTeams (a virtual environment for team training based on the TeamSTEPPS framework- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DiTeams), Immersive Learning Environments @ Duke (ILE@D – a virtual environment to enable situated cognition and student interaction-funded by the Duke Endowment / Nanaline Duke Trust), and a virtual environment for non-anesthesiology providers the cognitive skills of rapid sequence induction and moderate sedation–funded by the Army).
Over the past 10 years, Dr. Taekman has mentored nurses, medical students, residents, and faculty across the country on the uses of simulation in healthcare. He has a long history of innovation and excels at positioning trainees in rapidly emerging areas of investigation. Dr. Taekman has lectured internationally on matters related to educational technology, informatics, and simulation. His efforts were integral to the birth and rapid growth of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. Through his funded research, Dr. Taekman leads pioneering efforts to improve the quality of clinical trials and to expand the use of highly-distributable forms of interactive learning. Dr. Taekman was a founding member and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Simulation in Healthcare and reviews for a wide-range of journals. Dr. Taekman frequently reviews grants for the NIH, private foundations, and the military.
Ceranoglu Atilla T., M.D
Dr. Atilla Ceranoglu (Jay-RUN-oolou) is a child psychiatrist at Mass. General Hospital and specializes in treatment of children with severe injuries. He was quoted in media as an expert in parent-child communication. He received his medical degree in Istanbul, Turkey and completed his residency and fellowship in Boston area. He is married with two boys.
Sheryl Flynn
Dr. Flynn received her bachelor in physical therapy in 1991 from New York University . After practicing for four years in pediatrics, cardiac and neurological rehabilitation, and acute care, Sheryl began pursuing a PhD in motor control and motor learning at the University of Florida , with an emphasis on neuroplasticity. Dr. Flynn’s doctoral thesis focused on the recovery of walking ability after locomotor training in contused injured adult rats. This research experience led her to pursue a post-doctoral fellowship in Neuroscience at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida where she investigated the use of an enriched environment to improve upper extremity function in rats with cervical spinal cord hemisections. During most of her graduate work, Dr. Flynn also continued working as a physical therapist at Shands Rehabilitation Hospital where she treated individuals with spinal cord injuries and stroke or traumatic brain injuries.
Since completing her post-doctorate, Dr. Flynn has begun exciting work in the area of virtual reality and its application to promote plasticity after nervous system injury or disease. Dr. Flynn has also taught Neuroscience for Physical Therapists and Motor Control at the University of Florida and Georgia State University . Dr. Flynn recently moved to Southern California to further her research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Along with Drs. Rizzo, Lang and Winstein, Dr. Flynn recently received a grant which will provide initial resources for the exploration of the use of off the shelf virtual reality (VR) devices such as the Nintendo Wii or Sony PlayStation II EyeToy, among others, in rehabilitation of individuals with spinal cord injury, stroke, amputee or other neurological injuries. In addition to being a researcher and teacher, Dr. Flynn maintains her love for her patients by working at Precision Rehab on a part-time basis. In the near future, she plans to have an entire virtual reality rehabilitation room at Precision Rehab where she will conduct cutting edge research in the recovery of function after nervous system injury.
Tim Holt
Tim Holt is the Technology Director at PCI Education, an educational publisher located in San Antonio, TX. PCI focuses on special education for learning and intellectual developmentally disabled students. Tim’s background is in computer science and university research, however he has worked for a number of years in both the entertainment and educational/serious games industry. He is currently creating accessible interactive content for Special Ed students to both teach and provide embedded assessment via familiar game and social experiences.
Ann Maloney, M.D.
Dr. Ann Maloney is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Tufts University and the University Of Vermont practicing at Maine Medical Center. After training in psychiatry, child psychiatry and research methodology at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she focused on the psychobiology of neurodevelopmental disorders and treatments. She has worked with youth who suffer from early onset schizophrenia in studies of treatments and side effects of psychotropic medications. Because weight gain is common with medications, she has studied exergames like DDR. She has worked in schools, homes and afterschools to bring rigorous testing methods and experimental designs of exergames to at-risk populations, such as obese youth.
Ann works on a USDA federal grant with Barbara Chamberlin, PhD on exergames like Wii and Dance Dance Revolution. Support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation helps the team to test “Family Exergaming” with DDR for clinical populations. Working with collaborators at UNC, Ann and her Maine-based team are funded by NIH to examine whether an intensive brain training game (delivered as a computerized intervention derived from work with Posit Neuroscience) will improve central auditory, visual processing and executive functioning in vulnerable youth with thought disorders. Her team will study youth with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and focus on neurocognition (as the primary outcome measure). Her team studies other endpoints of interest like global functioning, psychiatric symptoms, and blood test changes in Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF).
Peter Smith
Peter Smith is a longtime active member of the serious games community and co-authored with Ben Sawyer a widely lauded serious games taxonomy that detailed the many fields serious games were impacting. Currently Smith is the Director of the Training Technologies Lab at the Joint Advanced Distributive Learning (JADL) Co-Lab. In this position, he works primarily in the Games and Virtual Worlds Domains. Peter has participated in the design and production of numerous Serious Games in the academic, government and industrial domains. Peter has also participated in the operation of the Game Tech Initiative.
Stephen Yang
Stephen P. Yang, BS, MS, PhD-ABD is an assistant professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland (SUNY Cortland) and he researches the effectiveness of using exergames/active games for healthy benefits. As Co-Director of the ExerGame Lab (www.exergamelab.org), Yang investigates how to best use the latest exergames and gaming technologies for children, adolescents, and adults with and without disabilities. He keeps the exergaming world up to date on www.exergamelab.blogspot.com and is one of the founding members of The ExerGame Network www.exergamenetwork.org.
Ambassadors
The following individuals are people we recognize as having strong understanding and ability to connect you to local resources and leaders in the games for health field in their home country/region. We make no formal endorsement of their specific work, organization, products, or services. We do acknowledge our Ambassadors have consistently demonstrated a willingness to provide basic information of value to those who inquire. We thank them for their excellent service to The Games for Health Project, and our community.
Before contacting any of the ambassadors listed here please read our important disclaimer below
Disclaimer of Ambassador Leads
We have provided two means to contact our Ambassadors through email below. A country specific email through gamesforhealth.org sends your email to all recognized ambassadors in that country/region and includes gamesforhealth.org staff as well. Individual emails (if provided) allow you to contact that ambassador directly and privately. By looping us in to communications you provide gamesforhealth.org a means to monitor and assist our ambassadors with your informational requests.
While we recognize individuals below for their willingness to share information, and be responsive, each person below is also quite busy, and may take time to respond. They are not required to respond at length, or at all to every conceivable request. Inquiries to our ambassadors should be part of a multi-pronged effort to get the information and assistance you need. The Games For Health Project and Digitalmill, Inc. take no responsibility for the validity and veracity of the information they provide. Please use any information provided at your own risk and seek multiple sources of information and assistance. Any feedback on our ambassadors can be emailed to staff [at] gamesforhealth [dot] org.
